Border Crossing Quotes

And yet, despite this portrait of a self assured woman, Cindy seemed to have a near obsession with being where everyone was and doing what everyone was doing. ~ Imbolo Mbue

Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.
She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with white hair, with a daughter and a grand-daughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.
Or that's a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.
Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months' pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.
There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.
There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter's wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones. ~ Neil Gaiman

It seems jolly on the page. But imagine poverty, violence, natural disasters, or political fear driving you away from everything you know. Imagine how bad things get to make you leave behind your family, your friends, your lovers; your home, as humble as it might be; your church, say. Let's take it further - you've said good-bye to the graveyard, the dog, the goat, the mountains where you hunted, your grade school, your state, your favorite spot on the river where you fished and took time to think. ~ Luis Alberto Urrea

Sadly, at a time when so much sophisticated cultural criticism by hip intellectuals from diverse locations extols a vision of cultural hybridity, border crossing, subjectivity constructed out of plurality, the vast majority of folks in this society still believe in a notion of identity that is rooted in a sense of essential traits and characteristics that are fixed and static. ~ Bell Hooks

Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there? ~ Leslie Jamison

One of the traits of sophistication is the capacity to cross borders between different cultural relevancies. Humor is often, intentionally or not, the result if not the very technique of such border-crossing. Much of Jewish humor reflects a long history, perhaps all the way back to the Exodus, of Jews migrating between cultures. ... American Jewish humor functioned as a marker of insider sophistication. ~ Peter L. Berger

Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn't. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn't let her. She didn't believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country. ~ Dionne Brand

Border crossing' is a recurrent theme in all aspects of my work -- editing, writing, and painting. I'm interested in the various ways artists not only cross borders but also subvert them. In mythology, the old Trickster figure Coyote is a champion border crosser, mischievously dashing from the land of the living to the land of the dead, from the wilderness world of magic to the human world. He tears things down so they can be made anew. He's a rascal, but also a culture hero, dancing on borders, ignoring the rules, as many of our most innovative artists do. I'm particularly drawn to art that crosses the borders critics have erected between 'high art' and 'popular culture,' between 'mainstream' and 'genre,' or between one genre and another -- I love that moment of passage between the two; that place on the border where two worlds meet and energize each other, where Coyote enters and shakes things up. But I still have a great love for traditional fantasy, for Imaginary World, center-of-the-genre stories. I'm still excited by series books and trilogies if they're well written and use mythic tropes in interesting ways. ~ Terri Windling

... taking some precautions may attract unwanted attention and scrutiny, even if the precautions otherwise succeed in protecting your information. For example, if detected by a border agent, the fact that you wiped your hard drive may prompt the agent to ask why you did so. Even traveling without devices or data that most travelers typically have could attract suspicion and questions. ~ Sophia Cope

Notably, during this era, the notion of illegal immigration did not conjure the same political and legal consequences that it would after 1965 [...] The southern border of the United States was not militarized or guarded in the manner it would become in the late twentieth century, and seasonal, uncapped migration from Mexico was an accepted and expected labor reality. ~ Pratheepan Gulasekaram

Poem in October"

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could ~ Dylan Thomas

We propose that BPD involves secondary structural dissociation. Consistent with this, Golynkina and Ryle (1999) found that patients with BPD encompassed a dissociative part of the personality that seems to represent an ANP (a coping ANP) and more than one EP (abuser rage, victim rage, passive victim, and zombie). Some patients with BPD have severe dissociative symptoms, and may actually border on DDNOS or DID. Our clinical observations suggest that dissociative parts in BPD patients have less emancipation and elaboration, and less distinct sense of self than in DDNOS or DID. ~ Ellert R.S. Nijenhuis

This is not the first time that Mexican authorities have handed over an Arab from a country with known Al Qaeda connections to a local sheriff across the border. FBI picks them up and disappears. ~ John Culberson

And, of course, millions of us cross the border to work in US homes and gardens and factories and carpentry shops and restaurants, and if you go to a restaurant pretty much anywhere in the United States, the chances are that the dishes will be washed by a Mexican. ~ Alma Guillermoprieto

While they sipped Sue went to the window and thoughtfully said, "It is such a beautiful sunset, Richard."
"They are mostly beautiful from here, owing to the rays crossing the mist of the vale. But I lose them all, as they don't shine into this gloomy corner where I lie."
"Wouldn't you like to see this particular one? It is like heaven opened."
"Ah yes! But I can't. ~ Thomas Hardy

Instead of engaging on the merits and saying, "Well, we want an open border, you know, we really do," and that's all good for America because they know the people will reject that, they [the elites] attack Donald Trump as an extremist, which I think is unfair. ~ Jeff Sessions

Being the first to cross the finish line makes you a winner in only one phase of life. It's what you do after you cross the line that really counts. ~ Ralph Boston

Many people make their way to user experience by crossing over from an adjacent field. These crossovers are the people who are carrying UX forward, taking it to new levels and new organizations. ~ Leah Buley

In August, the Hungarians cut the barbed wire at their border with Austria, creating the first hole in the Eastern Bloc. ~ Anna Funder

They are the largest collection of freshwater lakes in the world. They border eight U.S. states and the Canadian Providence of Ontario and at time have supplied water to one-third of Canadians and one-seventh of Americans. They're vaster than the entire New England region and define beachfront to many people who have never seen an ocean. ~ Susan Magsamen

The single dinner plate, the silent house, the tumbler in the sink--this was how it would be if he lost her. His mother had gone quickly, from liver cancer, the mass discovered too late. He thought of his father alone in his condo, crossing off days on the calendar like a prisoner. He'd survived her by thirteen years, yet every time Henry saw him, he quoted her as if they'd just spoken. Henry could picture himself doing the same to the children. He already lived too much in his memory. ~ Stewart O'Nan

These are the figures of steel whose eagle eyes dart between whirling propellers to pierce the cloud; who dare the hellish crossing through fields of roaring craters, gripped in the chaos of tank engines ... men relentlessly saturated with the spirit of battle, men whose urgent wanting discharges itself in a single concentrated and determined release of energy.
As I watch them noiselessly slicing alleyways into barbed wire, digging steps to storm outward, synchronizing luminous watches, finding the North by the stars, the recognition flashes: this is the new man. The pioneers of storm, the elect of central Europe. A whole new race, intelligent, strong, men of will ... supple predators straining with energy. They will be architects building on the ruined foundations of the world. ~ Ernst Junger

Charlie doesn't know herself. Four years from now, at eighteen, she'll join a cult across the Mexican border whose charismatic leader promotes a diet of raw eggs; she'll nearly die from salmonella poisoning before Lou rescues her. A cocaine habit will require partial reconstruction of her nose, changing her appearance, and a series of feckless, domineering men will leave her solitary in her late twenties, trying to broker peace between Rolph and Lou, who will have stopped speaking. ~ Jennifer Egan

The drug problem is in the United States, not in Mexico. It's a demand problem and that is to be dealt with here, and it is not being dealt with. It's been shown over and over that prevention and treatment are far more cost effective than police action, out-of-country action, border control, and so on. ~ Noam Chomsky

It's lovely that the Hollywood stars are crossing over to Broadway ... There used to be such a dividing line in the country between Hollywood and the theatre and that's just melting away. It's just wonderful right now! ~ Julie Andrews

What I think a lot of great marathon runners do is envision crossing that finish line. Visualization is critical. But for me, I set a lot of little goals along the way to get my mind off that overwhelming goal of 26.2 miles. I know I've got to get to 5, and 12, and 16, and then I celebrate those little victories along the way. ~ Bill Rancic

It wasn't her hypnotic eyes that drew him in
or the wild sway of her hips;
it was that devil's blood-red lipstick
smeared all over her chubby angel lips.
He shivered with the magnitude
of impending heaven and hell in one woman.
He crashed into heaven
while crossing the thresholds of hell. ~ Melody Lee

In the Alco Ward a dispute had broken out over plagiarism. Incidentally, when I arrived there for the first time I did not have the slightest notion that I was crossing the threshold of a creative writing program, that I was entering a community of people of the pen, of writers who were incessantly creating their alcoholic autobiographies, recording their innermost feeling in cheap sixty-page notebooks that were called emotional journals, laboriously assembling their drunkard's confessions. ~ Jerzy Pilch

It was a sunrise, a kid's sight of snowfall on a school morning. Hope. That all this can turn out okay, that somehow a tide this big and black can be turned back. Hope like a wildfire, thoughts of presents under a Christmas tree and a smell of cookies coming from a kitchen and a certain look in a girl's eyes that lights you up inside. That beautiful border between nightmare and morning when you realize that all of the monsters menacing you have evaporated like smoke, leaving behind only the warm blanket and the pale sunlight of a Saturday dawn. ~ David Wong

If a man, having lashed two hulls together, is crossing a river, and an empty boat happens along and bumps into him, no matter how hot-tempered the man may be, he will not get angry. But if there should be someone in the other boat, then he will shout out to haul this way or veer that. If his first shout is unheeded, he will shout again, and if that is not heard, he will shout a third time, this time with a torrent of curses following. In the first instance, he wasn't angry; now in the second he is. Earlier he faced emptiness, now he faces occupancy. If a man could succeed in making himself empty, and in that way wander through the world, then who could do him harm? ~ Zhuangzi

The sky above us seems huge, vast. It's clear and crisp and visibility is so good that, when I look up, I feel like I'm staring at an inverted, endless ocean. I'm sure the blue is the colour of water above sand and the tiny, wispy clouds look like waves breaking over distant swells. I envy the birds I see overhead, zipping joyfully from left to right and so far above the death and decay that pollute the lower levels. A day like this should be enjoyed completely. I should be able to forget what dwells in the towns around us, I should find it in myself to dismiss what happened at that crossing, I should. ~ Jack Croxall

At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border? ~ Milan Kundera

This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eilimate disparity. the traffic stops. ~ George Saunders

Cillian Murphy is the guy who battled viral zombies in '28 Days Later' and put a gas-spewing bag over his head in 'Batman Begins'. With his pallor, cut-glass cheekbones and glazed blue eyes, he's right on the border between dreamboat and spooky freak. ~ David Edelstein

I think what education gives you is a voice. It gives you a way of talking to a judge. When a policeman pulls you off to the side of the road, you have a voice. When you cross a border, you have a voice. When you are writing to express your opinions, you have a voice. ~ Richard Rodriguez

In a lot of ways, I was kind of crossing lines of what I thought I was comfortable doing. I had to do all this naked stuff. ~ Robert Pattinson

Imaginatively challenged folks, for whom crossing a state line amounted to foreign travel, could not conceive that the gray-blue-eyes inspecting them had, over the past year, similarly scrutinized Nandi warriors, Arab mullahs, Magyar landowners, French marshals, Prussian academics, and practically every monarch or minister of consequence in Europe--not to mention the maquettes in Rodin's studio, and whatever dark truths flickered in the gaze of dying lions. ~ Edmund Morris

Without making a fetish of goal setting, and without letting "lists" of tasks we desire to do dominate us, some recording of goals is wise not only for the self-reminder these constitute, but also for the satisfaction of crossing things off. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

The border of a nationality does not exist 'in-itself' in the same way that, say, a mountain, a shell or the moon exists. The border of a nationality is a condition that exists, if it can be said to exist at all, in the mind of the one who passively accepts it as existing. It is a ready-cut cloth, a costume, a fabricated flag, which is used to cover our nothingness. ~ Cliff James

And then there are colors. The truth is that the brain knows far less about colors than one might suppose. It sees more or less clearly what the eyes show it, but when it comes to converting what it has seen into knowledge, it often suffers from one might call difficulties in orientation. Thanks to the unconscious confidence of a lifetime's experience, it unhesitatingly utters the names of the colors it calls elementary and complementary, but it immediately lost, perplexed and uncertain when it tries to formulate words that might serve as labels or explanatory markers for the things that verge on the ineffable, that border on the incommunicable, for the still nascent color which, with the eyes' other bemused approval and complicity, the hands and fingers are in the process of inventing and which will probably never even have its own name. Or perhaps it already does -- a name known only to the hands, because they mixed the paint as if they were dismantling the constituent parts of a note of music, because they became smeared with the color and kept the stain deep inside the dermis, and because only with the invisible knowledge of the fingers will one ever be able to paint the infinite fabric of dreams. Trusting in what the eyes believe they have seen, the brain-in-the-head states that, depending on conditions of light and shade, on the presence or absence of wind, on whether it is wet or dry, the beach is white or yellow or olden or gray or purple or any other shade in between ~ Jose Saramago

Crossing the room, he stopped infront of me. "I'm not going to bite."
"That's good."
"Unless you want me to," He said with a devilish grin. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

The border between good and evil passes not outside of us but within us ~ Pope Francis

I've found that many of the people who have a passion for karaoke too often have misplaced confidence, which can become aggressive and border on sadistic. I know my limits, and karaoke is where I draw the line. I wouldn't put anyone through the hell of listening to me sing a song, and I sure as shit wouldn't wait in line to do it. ~ Chelsea Handler

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity. ~ Graham Greene

Why are we outsourcing millions of high-paying jobs to China and India? Why don't we secure the border and stop the country from being flooded with millions of illegal immigrants? These are important questions on the mind of middle class voters all over America. ~ George Noory

The history of American women is all about leaving home - crossing ~ Gail Collins

My three older brothers and I lived with our parents in a big brick house located south of Main Street, four blocks west of where my father had grown up in the 1920s, eight blocks east of where my mother had grown up in the 1930s, one hundred miles south of Minneapolis, and five miles north of the Iowa border. Our ~ Hope Jahren

This late afternoon, they stood shoulder to shoulder at the masthead, watching the dockhands tie up the boat. Though she was four years younger and a girl, they were nearly the same height, Gina and Salvo. Gina was actually taller. No one could figure out where she got the height; her parents and brothers were not tall. Look, the villagers would say. Two "piccolo" brothers and a "di altezza" sister. Oh, that's because we have different fathers, Gina would reply dryly. Salvo would smack her upside the head when he heard her say this. Think what you're saying about our mother, he would scold, crossing himself and her at her impudence. ~ Paullina Simons

Usually, when I walk on a wire, I inspect the anchor point on both sides before crossing. ~ Philippe Petit

The thought of never crossing your path again is to enormous to bare, so for now I'll make dreams in my heart and remind myself to go and sit & remember them every once in a while. ~ Nikki Rowe

The Pentagon tested an anti-missile system in New Mexico Wednesday. The test was an incomplete success. While the interceptor was shooting down the incoming missile, three thousand illegal aliens walked right across the border under its nose. ~ Argus Hamilton

Border crossings in the Balkans, where bitter wars have been waged, were not regarded as pleasurable; in many places, they weren't even possible, and one avoided them. But, while riding in the droshky and later, when we dismounted, we saw the most luxuriant orchards and vegetable gardens, dark-violet eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, gigantic pumpkins and melons; I couldn't get over my amazement at all the different things that grew here. "That's what it's like here", said Mother, "a blessed land. And it's a civilized land, no one should be ashamed of being born here. ~ Elias Canetti

And then the rose-border. What intensity in those odorous buds of the Bon Silene, making the very spirit bound as though a message had reached it from heaven. And the verbena bed is compassed with fitful fragrance. Even the pansies, with their dewy eyes, are ready to rival the violets now ... Nor must the purple buds of the calycanthus be forgotten. 'Sweet-scented shrub' indeed; for let me hide but a single one of these in some fold of my dress, and the spices of Araby will float around me till the evening. ~ Sarah Smiley