Date: 1949-1952, 1953

"Hard, hard work, excavating and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It's internally done. It happens because you are powerless and unable t...

— Bellow, Saul (1915-2005)

Date: December, 1954

"Does Somebody look bored, / His thoughts vacant as plaster, with being year / After bleeding year, our immobile word?"

— Scott, Peter Dale (b. January 11, 1929)

Date: 1995

"Soul is the place, / stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind, / where such necessity grinds itself out"

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1995

"I came / again and again, each time accumulating lucidity, // until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling looking down / on the two souls clasped there on the bed /with their mortal boundaries // visible around them like lines on a map."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1995

But the Nudes are still as clear in my mind / as pieces of laundry that froze on the clothesline overnight."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 1995

"She has reversed the roles of thou and Thou / not as a display of power but to force out of herself some pity / for this soul trapped in glass, / which is her true creation."

— Carson, Anne (b. 1951)

Date: 2007

"I have a brain full of remembered names but the road is often blocked with rubble."

— Engel, Howard (b. 1931)

Date: 2007

"[M]y brain ... did most of what I wanted it to do, but it had sand traps that I learned to avoid."

— Engel, Howard (b. 1931)

Date: 2007

"I knew I could no longer rely on the 'sticking plaster' of memory"

— Engel, Howard (b. 1931)

Date: December 31, 2016

"The human brain didn't evolve like a piece of sedimentary rock, with layers of increasing cognitive sophistication slowly accruing over time."

— Barrett, Lisa Feldman (b. 1963)