Date: 1992

"Patrick had tried to sleep, but tattered rags of speed still trailed through his consciousness and kept him charging forward."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1998

"His nakedness against the sheet, the wanton tangle of bedclothes by his ankle, and the sight of his own genitalia, at his age not yet fully obscured by the swell and spread of his gut, sent vague sexual thoughts floating across his mind like remote summer clouds."

— McEwan, Ian (b. 1948)

Date: 2000

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

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

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

"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)

Date: 2006

"Weber still saw the rarest of butterflies, fluttering mind, its paired wings pinned to the film in obscene detail."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2009

"One day quite soon, probably within the year, he will walk out of a room and never see her again, and this thought is so hard to conceive of that he shoves it away violently, concentrating instead on himself: his hangover, how tired he feels, how the pain throbs in his temples as he trots down t...

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"As all the thoughts and images of consciousness began to move in directions over which I had no control, and I seemed to be lying there watching them, like a kind of lazy sheepdog of the mind, I knew sleep was around the corner."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)