put in mind

It made me feel a lot more grateful, maybe because I’m 53 now, and I have kids who I’m watching grow up really quickly, and I need only be put in mind of, “What if I wasn’t here for them?”

Time and again while writing “The Boys,” I was put in mind of Kafka’s second category — the shift from observation to invention.

One is put in mind, at times, of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, writing “The Little Prince,” and also, in a desperate time of war, using children’s literature to instruct readers in the necessity of pluralism and a dislocated love of others.

I’m put in mind of an observation that Samuel Butler, the Victorian man of letters, made about the pairing of another difficult couple: that it had the virtue of making only two people miserable rather than four.

Some readers will be put in mind of Norman Mailer’s epic “The Executioner’s Song,” about the surreal events surrounding the execution of the convicted killer Gary Gilmore in Utah in the 1970s.