Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"Everything I saw, faces, bodies ambling through the cabin, stowing their baggage here, sitting down, stowing their baggage there, sitting down, was followed by a reflective shadow that could not desist from telling me that I was seeing this now while aware that I was seeing this, and so on ad ab...

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: May 27, 2010

"When you direct your mental spotlight to the basketball passes, it leaves the rest of the world in darkness."

— Bloom, Paul (b. 1963)

Date: October 31, 2011

"And then there were the experiments, each one a snapshot into the dark box of the brain."

— Carey, Benedict (b. 1960)

Date: May 7, 2012

"If you're anything like me, you probably spend the majority of your time either second-guessing the past or dreading the future, neither of which actually exists; having to navigate those teeming streets narrows the beam of my consciousness to the laser's width of the instant I actually inhabit."

— Kreider, Tim (b. 1967)

Date: September 27, 2012

"The conservative mind, a repository of fresh ideas just two decades ago, is now little more than a click-click slide projector holding a tray of apocalyptic images of modern life that keeps spinning around, raising the viewer’s fever with every rotation."

— Lilla, Mark (b. 1956)

Date: July 21, 2014

"Perhaps because Harry's life, on the page and, even more luridly, onscreen, was measured out in highlights, as the plot demanded, whereas Mason is revealed in a string of lowlights, or in those episodes which seem dim and dull at the time, and only later shine in memory's cave."

— Lane, Anthony (b. 1962)

Date: March, 2014

"Culture: a kind of knife: / cuts one way     opens / your brain to a certain / breed of light     shaves / consciousness to its // purpose, its cross."

— Seibles, Tim (b. 1955)

Date: January 21, 2015

"Why aren't we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life?"

— Burkeman, Oliver (b. 1975)

Date: April 11, 2015

"About once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)

Date: April 11, 2015

"Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet."

— Brooks, David (b. 1961)