Date: 1999

"A soul was like a worm in an apple, my mother told me."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: 1999

"Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere."

— Offill, Jenny (b. 1968)

Date: June 19, 2000

"The record she'd given me was playing in my mind, and I kept trying to shut it off."

— Packer, ZZ (b. 1973)

Date: June 19, 2000

"The words slid from my brain, and knotted in my stomach."

— Packer, ZZ (b. 1973)

Date: 2006

"More and more in recent weeks, he had found himself approaching likewise the condition of an empty cylinder, ony intermittently occupied by intelligent thought."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 2006

"... moving from the minor mode it had been in throughout into the major, ending with a Picardy third cadence that, if it did not break Lew's heart exactly, did leave a fine crack that in time was to prove unmendable."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 2006

"It was a time in Cripple and Victor, Leadville and Creede, when men were finding their way to the unblastable seams of their own secret natures, learning the true names of desire, which spoke, so they dreamed, would open the way through the mountains to all that had been denied them."

— Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937)

Date: 2006

"That he could enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own."

— McCarthy, Cormac (b. 1933)

Date: 2006

"Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts."

— McCarthy, Cormac (b. 1933)

Date: 2006

"The brain is a mind-boggling redesign. But it can't escape its past. [...] She pictured those mangled Kearney mansions, glorious old wooden Victorians enlarged with brick in the 1930s and again in the 1970s with pressboard and aluminum."

— Powers, Richard (b. 1957)