Date: 2010

"One bore the Professorial stigmata, if only brainular, for years."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"I still have my old paperback copy of Spenser's poem and just looking at it--the pages and pages of bewildering verse in tiny print, the demented little crib notes I've scribbled in the margins--can induce in me a sort of mental seasickness."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"After enough angst and pot and lack of sleep the poet's romance-world--so dense with weird archaisms and arcane symbols, bizarre characters, confusing plots and subplots--seemed more and more to allegorize the scary mental maze in which I found myself."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"But the squalor of it sank into my soul, adding not a little to the septic murk within."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: June 1, 2010

"Anyone who's closely read Mr. Hitchens's work -- including his best-selling manifesto 'God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything' (2007) -- or seen him do battle on cable news programs, knows that he has a mind like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent's arguments ...

— Garner, Dwight (b. 1965)

Date: June 1, 2010

"His mental Swiss Army knife also contains, happily, a corkscrew."

— Garner, Dwight (b. 1965)

Date: March 29, 2010

"Drip, drip, drip — that’s what insomniac thoughts feel like, a leaky faucet behind the eyes."

— Marino, Gordon

Date: February 25, 2010

"There is no longer much debate over whether evolution sculptured the fleshy machine inside our head."

— Lehrer, Jonah

Date: February 25, 2010

"Their evolutionary perspective, however — they see the mind as a fine-tuned machine that is not prone to pointless programming bugs — led them to wonder if rumination had a purpose."

— Lehrer, Jonah

Date: February 25, 2010

"That’s because rumination is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to 'work' with all the information stuck in consciousness."

— Lehrer, Jonah