Date: 2007

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

— Díaz, Junot (b. 1968)

Date: 2007

"When panic grips your body and your heart is a hummingbird, / Raven thoughts blacken your mind until you're breathing in reverse, / All your friends and sedatives mean well, but make it worse, / Every reassurance just magnifies the doubt, / Better find yourself a place to level out."

— Oberst, Conor Mullen (b. 1980)

Date: 2007

"Got a cricket for a conscience, always looks the other way."

— Oberst, Conor Mullen (b. 1980)

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: 2008

"Oh Bryn, you see through the dark, / Right past the fireflies that sleep in my heart."

— Koenig, Ezra (b. 1984) [Vampire Weekend]

Date: 2009

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

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: December 2009

"Like an oyster / That cloisters a spoil of pearls, / Untouched— // The heart that’s had / Enough / Stays shut."

— Essbaum, Jill Alexander

Date: December 29, 2009

"We have to crack the cognitive egg and scramble it up."

— Strauch, Barbara

Date: 2009

"These are some of the things // you don't have to know because the melody / is like a small bird, maybe a yellow canary, / that wings its way into your mind / --no, into your heart-- / where there's a perch already // set up for it, a little trapeze / to swing back and forth on as it sings / and...

— Raab, Lawrence (b. 1946)

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)