Date: December 29, 2016

"By itself, not a lot, except to encourage the erroneous and simplistic idea that the brain is an independent sovereign, calling all the shots."

— Friedman, Richard A.

Date: 2016

"I wake between tectonic plates that hurt. / I have five faults, called senses."

— Galvin, James (b. May 8, 1951)

Date: 2016

"A rumination in my mind / Winding like the ramp at the Guggenheim."

— Oberst, Conor Mullen (b. 1980)

Date: January 18, 2017

"News that contradicts his worldview gets flushed down the sort of emotional and intellectual dispose-all that I think he carries around with him from the second he gets out of bed to the minute he goes to sleep each night."

— Kruse, Michael

Date: January 17, 2017

"A man who mocks John McCain, denounces Gold Star parents, snarls at an actor who spoofs him, and makes fun of a crippled reporter is someone whose core is empty, and whose need for approbation is unlimited because the void within him is so complete."

— Cohen, Eliot A. (b. 1956)

Date: January 17, 2017

"It not only gets the steel ball rolling onto the intestines, but also activates the senses, setting them to the frequencies at which the signals of new dangers can be received. Those signals appear as noise to the previous -- pre-war -- mind, as a breakdown in communication."

— Hemon, Aleksandr (b. 1964)

Date: January 17, 2017

"The new mind, which the body floods with adrenaline, begins -- like a rabbit in a forest of foxes -- to decode all the signals, even if it's not capable of fitting them into any narrative."

— Hemon, Aleksandr (b. 1964)

Date: January 12, 2017

"It opened a door in my mind, and behind that door I found the room where I wanted to spend the rest of my life."

— Auster, Paul (b. February 3, 1947)

Date: May 15, 2017

"We've got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)

Date: June 14, 2017

"Sadly I fear that Shakespeare's 'Crassus,' now showing in the theater of my imagination, might be just as controversial as the new "Julius Caesar" were it staged as an evocation of the Trump era, since it would end with its slain-by-Parthians Crassus having molten gold, a symbol of his avarice, ...

— Douthat, Ross (b. November 28, 1979)