Date: 2005

"It was as though my memories were pigeons and the accident a big noise that had scared them off."

— McCarthy, Tom (b. 1969)

Date: 2006

"The reptile brain, creeping out to sun itself."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

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: 2006

"A camel, that's what you are. A camel of consciousness."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)

Date: 2007

"She had a mind like a mongoose but she was not, in the end, a worldly woman."

— Díaz, Junot (b. 1968)

Date: 2008

"Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while wait...

— Adiga, Aravind (b. 1974)

Date: 2009

"His mind snagged on the word like a fish on a hook."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

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)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"But I didn't want to linger, nor could I perhaps, for the sensation lasted only a few moments, then my brain sank its claws into it and I went back to the kitchen where everything was as I had left it, except for the color of the drinks, which were shiny and full of small, grayish bubbles now."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)