Date: 2000

"'I must have done,' I said, feeling the memory of another dozen books slide down Lethe's greasy banks."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"He hadn't yet organised his memories of the conference into anecdote and he knew that unless he gave them that structure they would slip down the nearest drain."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 2000

"I fell silent, my mood shattered like the waves exploding on the coast below."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

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

"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: 2001

"Yet this self-censorship of my mind, the constant suppression of the memories surfacing in me, Austerlitz continued, demanded ever greater efforts and finally, and unavoidably, led to the almost total paralysis of my linguistic faculties, the destruction of all my notes and sketches, my endless ...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"And when at last I began to improve, said Austerlitz, I also recollected how once, while my mind was still quite submerged, I had seen myself standing, filled with a painful sense that something within me was trying to surface from oblivion, in front of a poster painted in bold brushstrokes whic...

— Sebald, W. G. (1944-2001)

Date: 2001

"But loss is a current: the coolness of one side of a wet finger held up, the faint hiss in your ears at midnight, water sliding over the dam at the back of your mind, memory unremembering itself."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: 2001

"Wind, ocean, fire: the things we like to liken our passions to don't break, can't stop."

— Richardson, James (b. 1950)

Date: 2002

"The river rises in the mind, but empties nowhere, / Its hair naked in naked branches."

— Wright, Charles (b. 1935)