Date: January 3, 2016

"It is popular among these people who apparently have brains wired like short-wave radios broadcasting from upper Michigan to say that the real constitutional authority in this country resides in its local sheriffs."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: January 14, 2016

"Then there's the risible campaign commercial in which the Tailgunner dresses up in camo and face paint and hangs out in the blind with the Duck Dynasty crew, looking like a G.I. Joe who's lost his kung-fu grip on his senses."

— Pierce, Charles P. (b. 1953)

Date: February 1, 2016

"Sharing videos, binge-watching Netflix, the resultant neuro-pudding at the end of an epic gaming marathon, the perverse seduction of recording and devouring our most ordinary human thoughts on Facebook and Instagram -- Wallace somehow knew all this was coming, and (as the man himself might have ...

— Bissell, Tom (b. 1974)

Date: February 1, 2016

"Which is to say that a novel is perishable only by virtue of being stored in such a leaky cask: our heads."

— Bissell, Tom (b. 1974)

Date: February 1, 2016

"I read for hours that way, morning after morning, my mind awhirl."

— Bissell, Tom (b. 1974)

Date: February 9, 2016

"There is something deeply disturbing in his [Ted Cruz's] disassociation, a lack of empathy which suggests a barren inner landscape."

— Patterson, Richard North (b. 1947)

Date: April 26, 2016

"It is by this dimension of imaginative relativity that Hogwarts, Middle Earth, Earthsea, Dickens's London, Hemingway's Paris, Didion's anxious California and the mind of Helen Oyeyemi, reclining like a sphinx between her pages in quiet and glittering sleep, all fit inside my tiny apartment, and ...

— Brennan, Summer

Date: March 31, 2016

"My mind is cloudy on these points."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: May 28, 2016

"It occurred to me that of all mind-boiling aspects of the current presidential race, the worst part was arguing with people whom I considered friends."

— Flores, Jake

Date: May 28, 2016

"The human brain is a pattern-matching machine."

— Vanderbilt, Tom (b. 1968)