Liminal Quotes

I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified. ~ Chris Abani

I've never had this kind of scrap with one of our kind, only heard about them. You ever hear about a whole town losing its memory, ships at sea that witness water doing things it shouldn't, like talking, or ever just notice a large plot of land that never changes even though the entire neighborhood around it does? That's my kind fighting in one form or another. Croatoan? That was us. ~ Ayize Jama-Everett

My loneliness ... still comes over me sometimes ... It's a liminal, lost sensation of having wandered wide, endless boulevards, among rows of orange trees, winter butterflies, seasons reversed and out of order, dogs barking from behind fences meant to keep out intruders. It's not the place that impoverishes me but I who bring my own sense of poverty, of loss, to the place. It's a sense of near nothingness, as though I were not so much a blank slate as an erased chalkboard, still bearing illegible smudges of smoothed-over writing. ~ Marco Roth

Cats liked to occupy liminal spaces: both inside and outside, both tame and wild, both yawn and meow. ~ Gail Carriger

Janet Mock's honest and sometimes searing journey is a rare and important look into la vida liminal, one that she manages to negotiate remarkably well, with grace, humor, and fierce grit. Mock doesn't only redefine what realness means to her, but challenges us to rethink our own perceptions of gender and sexuality, feminism and sisterhood, making this book a transcendent piece of American literature. ~ Raquel Cepeda

When there is no possibility of retreat, we will find the innovation that only the liminal situation can bring. In short, we find the faith of leap. ~ Alan Hirsch

What any experimental art is trying to get you to do is move beyond your preconceptions and your expectations regarding what should be happening, what's going to happen, what kinds of effects it should have, and enter a liminal state in which those things can be redefined in the way that the particular artist or piece of art is proposing. ~ Nathaniel Mackey

In liminal space, one meets the unknown, the marginalized, the synchronistic, the other, the unconscious edge of one's former narratives. At this point, the possibility to try out new narratives, to reframe one's story, becomes critical. Through narratives of participation the center of gravity shifts from fear and defensiveness to curiosity, creativity, and celebration. One begins to take a stand to validate one own's affects and doubts while at the same time interrogating them. The effect of such a shift is that the area of questioning about the self, the world, and the use of narrative language begins to widen noticeably. We can no longer assume there will be an outcome of homogeneous accounts through dialogue. The frames of narratives of participation anticipate heterogeneity rather than accord. ~ Helene Shulman

The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended. ~ George MacDonald

Dry leaves rustled up against the walls and skittered away. It was that time of year when it could be hot or cold from day to day; it was neither summer nor fall. An in-between, liminal time. A border. ~ Anonymous

We use rituals in our Moon Circle in order to set the evening apart as a sacred space. We use it to recentre ourselves, to allow crashing thoughts to melt away. Like music and art, rituals can open our hearts to new possibilities. They allow us to see with a fresh clarity, and bring us to a space of liminality. Liminal space is what we feel when we see a stunning sunset and the world around us drops away. It's when we hear a new song and begin crying at the traffic lights. It's the quiet of Christmas Eve, when everything is done and all the family is asleep, and your mind grows still and full of gladness. ~ Lucy AitkenRead

Sadly, semi-consciousness, along with daydreaming, is a capacity that is actively discouraged among children in schools, and our society is much poorer and harsher as a consequence. The value of liminal space and transitional imagination remain personally and culturally undeveloped. ~ Michael Leunig

religious rituals cast an aura of sacrality on bread by putting it in liminal contact with the celestial sphere. The meshing of the sacred with the profane endowed bread with a plethora of superimposed, ambivalent, and overcharged meanings, which the regime fully exploited. ~ Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi

… the countryside and the village are symbols of stability and security, of order. Yet they are also, as I have noted, liminal spaces, at a very narrow remove from the atavistic Wild. Arcadia is not the realm even of Giorgione and of Claude, with its cracked pillars and thunderbolts, its lurking banditti; still less is it Poussin's sun-dappled and regularised realm of order, where, although the lamb may be destined for the altar and the spit, all things proceed with charm and gravity and studied gesture; least of all is it the degenerate and prettified Arcady of Fragonard and Watteau, filled with simpering courtier-Corydons, pallid Olympians, and fat-arsed putti. (It is only family piety that prevents me from taking a poker to an inherited coffee service in gilt porcelain with bastardised, deutero-Fragonard scenes painted on the sides of every damned thing. Cue Wallace Greenslade: '… "Round the Horne", with Marie Antoinette as the dairymaid and Kenneth Williams as the manager of the camp-site….') No: Arcadia is the very margin of the liminal space between the safe tilth and the threatening Wild, in which Pan lurks, shaggy and goatish, and Death proclaims, from ambush, et in Arcadia ego. Arcadia is not the Wide World nor the Riverbank, but the Wild Wood. And in that wood are worse than stoats and weasels, and the true Pan is no Francis of Assisi figure, sheltering infant otters. The Wild that borders and penetrates Arcady is red in tooth and claw. ~ G.M.W. Wemyss

I'm liminal. What are you saying? What, you thought you were normal? ~ Ayize Jama-Everett

I've been told my liminal space is like the dark of the grave. But I think of it as the dark from the other end of life entirely. The dark of everything ahead, not everything behind. ~ John Scalzi

The Puffer Fish: Wherein the author flaunts his vocabulary.

His father was IRA and his mother was Quebecois, and they had reliquished their mortal coils in the internecine conflagration that ended their conjoined separatist movement, IRA-Q. The appellation he was given by his progenitors was Ray O'Vaque ("Like the battery," he'd elucidate, with an adamantine stare that proscribed any mirth). In his years of incarceration, however, he had earned the sobriquet "Uncle Milty" for his piscine amatory habits.
He had been emancipated from the penitentiary for three weeks, and now his restless peregrinations had conveyed him to this liminal place, seeking compurgation in the permafrost of the hyperborean tundra, which was an apt analogue of the permafrost in his heart. He insinuated himself into the caravansary with nugatory expectations, which were confirmed by the exiguous provisions for comfort. But then the bartender looked up from laving the begrimed bar, his eyes growing luminous as he ejactulated, "Milt! ~ Howard Mittelmark

The morning after I heard the gospel, however, I woke up with what felt like a hangover. Little would I know it was of the spiritual kind that accompanies the inevitable dawn of realization that life is not perhaps, what we previously thought it was. And we cannot go back to pretending. What a headache to be caught in that liminal space! Literally. ~ Carolyn Weber

Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that we are most free to explore identity in places outside of our normal routines, places that are in some way "betwixt and between." Turner calls them liminal, from the Latin word for "threshold. ~ Sherry Turkle

Sleep is such a potent, liminal state, and I don't want to drag anything in there that doesn't need to be there. ~ Bellamy Young

I become ocean, mercury, silver
shimmers, fairy tales, fascinated. ~ Helene Cardona

And then they walk away together, out of the allotted grooves of their afternoons and into the thickening shadows of evening, into the dim, liminal place where on path is taken, and another missed. ~ Laura Barnett

It's interesting
the way in which one has to balance life
because you have to know when to let go and when to pull back ... There's always some liminal (as opposed to subliminal) space in between which is harder to inhabit because it never feels as safe as moving from one extreme to another. ~ Bell Hooks

Designated objects of tolerance are invariably marked as undesirable and marginal, as liminal civil subjects or even liminal humans; and those called upon to exercise tolerance are asked to repress or override their hostility or repugnance in the name of civility, peace, or progress. Psychically, the former is the material of abjection and one variety of resentment (that associated with exclusion); the latter is the material of repressed aggression and another variety of resentment (that associated with forsworn strength or domination). ~ Wendy Brown

When you first open a book, you enter a liminal space. You are neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book (say, this book), nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward). To some extent this polydimensionality describes the feeling of reading in general-one is in many many places places at at once once. ~ Peter Mendelsund

Being a woman is inherently uncanny. Your humanity is liminal; your body is forfeit; your mind is doubted as a matter of course. You exist in the periphery, and I think many women writers can't help but respond to that state. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I love liminal characters. I love these characters that are outside and enter and consequently are perpetually outsiders, and who hold themselves to a higher standard. ~ Greg Rucka

This was Hist and Lit, after all. If you couldn't work the term "liminal" into your tutorial, you were doing it wrong. ~ Lauren Willig

I now wear the memory of nothingness
a piece of white sail wrapped like second skin. ~ Helene Cardona

Questioning the nature and implications of liminal instances necessarily involves failure, if only in the specifically technical sense of entering spaces where prevailing criteria of success scarcely apply. ~ Brian Ferneyhough

My interest has always been in the place where sex and race are both obscenely conspicuous and yet consciously suppressed, largely because of the liminal place that the Asian man occupies in the midst of it: an "honorary white" person who will always be denied the full perquisites of whiteness; an entitled man who will never quite be regarded or treated as a man; a nominal minority whose claim to be a "person of color" deserving of the special regard reserved for victims is taken seriously by no one. In an age characterised by the politics of resentment, the Asian man knows something of the resentment of the embattled white man besieged on all sides by grievances and demands for reparation, and something of the resentments of the rising social justice warrior, who feels with every fibre of their being that all that stands in the way of the attainment of their thwarted ambitions is nothing so much as a white man. Tasting of the frustrations of both, he is denied the entitlements of either. ~ Wesley Yang