Date: 2000

"A man in my position might easily head for the mountains and try to find consolation in their perseverance -- never mind the rock slides, the sinking plateaux and erupting islands -- or, at the opposite extreme, he might extort some pleasure from knowing that he will outlast the flies spinning o...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"I was driven by local emotions into a freewheeling lateral association, or downwards in a potentially endless search for the anchor at the end of some chain of thought, or upwards into more and more denuded categories of categories."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"And then, because this search can only find arbitrary resting-places, it was the whole process, accepted with complete permissiveness, which became fundamental; its endlessness was its resting-place: thoughts seemed to radiate from and collapse into the same source, as if the whole history of a ...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"As I breathed in I could feel my consciousness expanding along a glistening spider's web of total connectedness and as I exhaled it accordioned back into the tropical richness of my body, the streams and rivers of my blood."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"My mind floated like the Bullet Train above its tracks, meeting no obstruction; everything clear."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2004

"Ramachandran is a latter-day Marco Polo, journeying the silk road of science to strange and exotic Cathays of the mind."

— Dawkins, Richard (b. 1941)

Date: 2005

"It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: 2005

"They fluttered [my memories] back eventually--but when they did, their hierarchy had changed, and some that had had crappy places before ended up with better ones: I remembered them more clearly; they seemed more important."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: 2005

"Sometimes I'd be hooked out, plucked and hauled right up into the daylight where I'd find Trevellian shining his torch into me, its shaft falling across my mind's patterned surfaces but managing to occupy them only briefly before it retreated and the inner darkness massed again."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: 2005

"Odd things were unearthed, bits of memory that must have been floating around like the fragment of bone inside my knee."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)