Date: 1988

"My rank aroma was the perfume my soul exuded, devotion's air."

— Erdrich, Louise (b. 1954)

Date: 1995

"Soul is the place, / stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind, / where such necessity grinds itself out"

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1995

"I came / again and again, each time accumulating lucidity, // until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling looking down / on the two souls clasped there on the bed /with their mortal boundaries // visible around them like lines on a map."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1995

But the Nudes are still as clear in my mind / as pieces of laundry that froze on the clothesline overnight."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1995

"She has reversed the roles of thou and Thou / not as a display of power but to force out of herself some pity / for this soul trapped in glass, / which is her true creation."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1996

"My mind went blank."

— Fielding, Helen (b. 1958)

Date: 1999

"I love my brother dearly, but his mind is like a sieve."

— Budnitz, Judy (b. 1973)

Date: 1999

"On its own this trigger, as we can see from the earlier definition, is not going to generate consciousness. Imagine a candyfloss machine with a stick in the centre that then gathers more and more candyfloss as time goes on. Think of the epicentre as the stick in the centre, the burgeoning candy...

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)

Date: 1999

"Another rather simplistic analogy might be a boss, at the centre of a big organization that is eventually going to recruit managers and submanagers. What in the brain could be the equivalent of the boss? The most obvious candidate, and one that might immediately spring to mind, is the basic comp...

— Greenfield, Susan (b. 1950)

Date: 1999

"'How do you expect to learn anything when you fill your mind with garbage?' he said."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)