Delineating Bordering Quotes

I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way I could. ~ John James Audubon

And now, it seems, they are all here: the handsome masculine ones desired alike by men and women; the gushing swishes, hands aflutter like wings; the few stray women secure among the men who will idolize them but not love them; and as in any group of homosexuals and those lured for whatever reason to them, there is here a mood of superficial good humor, of euphoria bordering on hysteria. So ~ John Rechy

Prior to modern times, the term 'Islamic' (Islami in Arabic) was almost never used to define the provenance, status, or substance of things. There was no such thing as 'Islamic art', 'Islamic economics', or even 'Islamic law.' ... The encounter with the modern West, however, ultimately changed the status of 'Islamic.' Inasmuch as the rise of the West converted the achievements of Darwin, Descartes, and Hegel from mere English, French, or German achievements into explicitly 'Western' ones, it also engendered the need for a parallel convention for demarcating the non-Western 'other.' The Western provenance of the modern neologism 'Islamic' is perhaps best revealed in its tendency to connote geography and ethnicity. 'Islamic', in other words, connotes not simply that which is related to or a product of Islam as a religion but that which relates to a particularly non-European people in a non-European part of the world. In this capacity, it carries both a descriptive and a prescriptive force... For no modern Muslim nor non-Muslim would include the likes of such Arab Christians as Michel Aflaq or San' Allah Ibrahim among the 'thinkers of Islam.' Rather, in Western parlance, the modern 'Islamic' began as an instrument to demarcate the boundary between the west and a particular set of 'others.' In Muslim hands, it would go on to evolve into a full-blown signifier of normative Islam and a tool for delineating the boundary between it and Islam. Its added utility, moreover, as a mechani ~ Sherman A. Jackson

I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow, or again for that movement of her plump shoulders. But, probably the truth was that I loved her because she loved me. To her I was the ideal man: brains, pluck. And there was none dressed better. I remember once, when I first put on that new dinner jacket, with the vast trousers, she clapsed her hands, sank down on a chair and murmured: 'Oh, Hermann ... It was ravishment bordering upon something like heavenly woe. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness ~ Erich Segal

Will had discovered, even before coming to the City, that his muse was, like all muses, an incredibly finicky and temperamental mistress. He'd had several good short stories over the years, a few of them bordering on brilliant, and some of them had even been published; but these gifts from his imaginary goddess of inspiration were, in truth, frustratingly infrequent. She would hang around and whisper in his ears for hours, or days, or weeks, and then suddenly go off on an extended vacation without informing Will of her whereabouts or when she planned to return. ~ Chris Lester

The problem with reality TV is that creative writers are not involved; TV folks are, and some journalists who will only mine the surface of subjects. Hard work necessary for discovering and delineating the intimacies of the subjects they capture is mostly avoided. ~ Lee Gutkind

I'll take a game of cards to stitchery any day. My brothers are shrewd, bordering on thieves when it comes to their cards - the best kind of teachers to have. Last ~ Mary E. Pearson

Tall and fair, with blue-green eyes, sandy hair streaked by the sun, and a lean and comely body, Gerris Drinkwater had a swagger to him, a confidence bordering on arrogance. ~ George R R Martin

She was beautiful, too, with dark eyebrows and deep-set eyes outlined in black. Her image was like sharp glass cutting into me, I rushed to the surface to meet her with an urgency bordering on hysteria. Someone get gauze and bandages. I'm falling out. She's some dream I had. She's got part of me I didn't know I needed. ~ Bett Williams

Tom had never found any difficulty in discerning a pointer from a setter, when once he had been told the distinction, and his perceptive powers were not at all deficient. I fancy they were quite as strong as those of the Rev. Mr Stelling; for Tom could predict with accuracy what number of horses were cantering behind him, he could throw a stone right into the centre of a given ripple, he could guess to a fraction how many lengths of his stick it would take to reach across the playground, and could draw almost perfect squares on his slate without any measurement. But Mr Stelling took no note of those things: he only observed that Tom's faculties failed him before the abstractions hideously symbolized to him in the pages of the Eton Grammar, and that he was in a state bordering on idiocy with regard to the demonstration that two given triangles must be equal - though he could discern with great promptitude and certainty the fact that they were equal. ~ George Eliot

Beyond the bordering weeds a fence strangled in limp dilapidation, and from the weeds beside it the handles of a plow stood at a gaunt angle while its shard rusted peacefully in the undergrowth, and other implements rusted half concealed there - skeletons of labor healed over by the earth they were to have violated, kinder than they. ~ William Faulkner

As a writer, you have to put yourself in service to the character, get behind their eyes by delineating the world where the character develops. You have to listen to the character and see him inside his certain world to know what conclusions he would draw. ~ Alice McDermott

And yet how treacherous, I thought, after such neutrality, bordering on indifference, and occaisonally open hostility, when the whole city finally seemed alive and tremulous to my touch, a seething structure reaching out to meet me and accommodate my every move, as if I had been expected and was welcome there, that she was the only thing in it that would not respond. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Despite the goings-on in Congress, I don't believe the USA is bordering on madness. I believe Mexico and Canada are. ~ Robert Breault

to tell people to stop practicing their faith was imperialism in nineties clothing, a colonial hangover bordering on racism. Instead, we were embraced as a new generation of anti-colonial politicized youth. Curiously, ~ Maajid Nawaz

Mann was less interested, I think, in constructing any kind of "portrait of an age" than he was in delineating an individual consciousness in which profound struggles about identity and direction arise - struggles that Mann himself had not only reflected on but felt keenly. Visconti takes up this central focus of the novella, but he couples it with a more social perspective. ~ Philip Kitcher

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.

Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome. ~ Paul Theroux

I don't mean to ruin the ending for you, sweet child, but life is one long headwind. To make any kind of impact requires self-will bordering on madness. The world will be hostile, it will be suspicious of your intent, it will misinterpret you, it will inject you with doubt, it will flatter you into self-sabotage. My God, I'm making it sound so glamorous and personal! What the world is, more than anything? It's indifferent."
"Say amen to that," Spencer said.
"But you have a vision. You put a frame around it. You sign your name anyway. That's the risk. That's the leap. That's the madness: thinking anyone's going to care. ~ Maria Semple

The whole genius of an author consists in describing well, and delineating character well. Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace only excel other writers by their expressions and images; we must indicate what is true if we mean to write naturally, forcibly and delicately. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

The most foreign fighters in Iraq are wearing British and American uniforms. The level of self-delusion is bordering frankly on the racist. The vast majority of the people of Iraq are against the occupation of Iraq by the American and British forces. ~ George Galloway

All over the world, people are being quarantined and are being compelled to practice social distancing. We are trying desperately to remain sane in a world that seems bordering on the insane. So, the time is just right for us to ponder, reflect, meditate, and discover the world within our own minds. ~ Avijeet Das

She heard his grunt - bordering on a roar - and felt herself being hauled up. She ~ Marissa Meyer

California: bordering always on the Pacific and sometimes on the ridiculous. So, why do I live here? Because the sun goes down a block from my house. ~ George Carlin

Miss Bingley was very deeply mortified by Darcy's marriage; but as she thought it advisable to retain the right of visiting at Pemberley, she dropt all her resentment; was fonder than ever of Georgiana, almost as attentive to Darcy as heretofore, and paid off every arrear of civility to Elizabeth.

Pemberley was now Georgiana's home; and the attachment of the sisters was exactly what Darcy had hoped to see. They were able to love each other, even as well as they intended. Georgiana had the highest opinion in the world of Elizabeth; though at first she often listened with an astonishment bordering on alarm at her lively, sportive manner of talking to her brother. He, who had always inspired in herself a respect which almost overcame her affection, she now saw the object of open pleasantry. Her mind received knowledge which had never before fallen in her way. By Elizabeth's instructions she began to comprehend that a woman may take liberties with her husband which a brother will not always allow in a sister more than ten years younger than himself.

Lady Catherine was extremely indignant on the marriage of her nephew; and as she gave way to all the genuine frankness of her character, in her reply to the letter which announced its arrangement, she sent him language so very abusive, especially of Elizabeth, that for some time all intercourse was at an end. But at length, by Elizabeth's persuasion, he was prevailed on to overlook the offence, and seek a recon ~ Jane Austen

The California supreme court, following the English common-law, decided that the owner of land bordering a watercourse was entitled only to the usufruct of the water; that if he used it he must return it to its original course unimpaired in quality and undiminished in volume. ~ Jerome Hart

We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it. ~ William Hazlitt

Love Your "self" without bordering it, in it's true nature. Love just the "Limitless, Timeless & Spaceless Self ~ Anowar Hossain

We are made for art ... The moment Maddy took up the tendril phrase, Els knew she was as dear to him as his own life. Talons gripped his ribs, and he felt a joy bordering on panic. He needed to know how this woman would unfold. He needed to write music that would settle into her range like frost on fields. They'd spend their years together, grow old, get sick, die in shared bewilderment. ~ Richard Powers

I think her and Cam work because he's never tried to do that. Their love is different, much easier to be around, where George and Maca's love was intense, bordering on obsessive. It was like they needed each other more than air. I don't know how to describe it, really, but that's how it came across as an outsider looking in. ~ Lesley Jones

The whole experience co-curating the Biennial was a learning experience. The Suburban and The Poor Farm are not institutions. They are not by design, organized around power structures. Because I am someone who thrives on delineating context, seeing up close the inner workings of the museum was not wasted on me. ~ Michelle Grabner

I doubt if I shall ever outgrow the excitement bordering on panic which I feel the instant I know I have a strong, unmanageable fish, be it brook trout, brown trout, cutthroat, rainbow, steelhead or salmon on my line. ~ Ed Weeks

I didn't have a choice."
"Are you saying...What are you saying?" Is he...could he be talking about me?
He runs a hand through his hair. I've never seen him this emotional before. He's always so controlled, so sure of himself. "I'm saying you're what I want, Emma. I'm saying I'm in love with you."
He steps forward and lifts his hand to my cheek, blazing a line of fire with his fingertips as they trace down to my mouth. "How do you think it would make me feel to see you with Grom?" he whispers. "Like someone ripped my heart out and put it through Rachel's meat grinder, that's how. Probably worse. It would probably kill me. Emma, please don't cry."
I throw my hands in the air. "Don't cry? Are you serious? Why did you come here, Galen? Did you think it would make me feel better to know that you do love me, but that it still won't work out? That I still have to mate with Grom for the greater good? Don't you tell me not to cry, Galen! I...c...c...can't h...h...help-" The waterworks soak me. Galen looks at me, hands by his side, helpless as a trapped crab. I'm bordering on hyperventilation, and pretty soon I'll start hiccupping. This is too much.
His expression is so severe, it looks like he's in physical pain. "Emma," he breathes. "Emma, does this mean you feel the same way? Do you care for me at all?"
I laugh, but it sounds sharper than I intended, because of a hiccup. "What does it matter how I feel, Galen? I think we pretty much covered why. No need ~ Anna Banks

The whole Rebellion was a highly illegal action bordering on treason. When the rules don´t work, you break them. ~ Timothy Zhan

If anyone bothered to search through the laurel bordering the asphalt he'd surely find handfuls of teeth that were said to give the laurel its odd milky color, ivory with a pale pink edge, each blossom forming the shape of a bitter man's mouth. ~ Alice Hoffman

I can still smell you on my pillow. I can still see you standing in my room, the light caressing your smooth legs, your dark hair cascading over your shoulders, and your gorgeous mouth smiling so effortlessly. I miss you. I ache for you, and I'm bordering on crazy without you. Come back to me. ~ Renee Carlino

Scots they're either nice or they're horrid and these two are horrid. The Scots wont like that Eamon, thats bordering on racism. Its not racism its ethnic criticism Bill. ~ Eamon Dunphy

Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labor of love bordering on madness. ~ Steven Saylor