Periphery Quotes

White exists on the periphery of life. Bleached bones connect us to death, but the white of milk and eggs, for example, speaks to us of life. ~ Kenya Hara

And so it was, that their beautiful love ended up being in the realms of the unknown, thrown to the future, pending, undeveloped, and unfinished. Always on the periphery. ~ Shahd Alshammari

I hear his heartbeats as my own, I feel his urgency as my own, our covalent union making of us both a new, charged, unknown substance; so too my skin, my liquidy skin, is both our separation and our merger, it is our shared, evanescent frontier; yet when he kisses the valley of my belly so long and so shiver-warm I realize that I am also beyond his skin's extremity, I am past the barrier of his skin, I am also living within him, for the juncture is no longer clear: utterly, entirely, I feel his response to me, I feel his churning when I surge; and it is sublime circuitry, this overlap, this confusion, giving me new contours, new periphery, expand­ing me into added dimensions,... ~ Evan Dara

I really love music that's on the periphery of not fitting into a clear genre. I felt like I was constantly being described as something I didn't really feel like I identified with. ~ Kathleen Edwards

As Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task.

If the church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism will become immeasurably more difficult in the next. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance.

For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.

Thinking about your faith is indeed a virtue, for it helps you to better understand and defend your faith. But thinking about your faith is not equivalent to doubting your faith.

Doubt is never a purely intellectual problem. There is a spiritual dimension to the problem that must be recognized. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in spiritual warfare and there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you.

Reason can be used to defend our faith by formulating arguments for the existence of God or by refuting objections. But though the arguments so developed serve to confirm the truth of our faith, they are not properly the basi ~ William Lane Craig

the details of anything you love are
always what is most thrilling, most poignant,
most important.
i loved her as she rose from bed and fell back
against it again, and all she did in-between.
when you love someone you accept them,
you become them in a way, and all they
do forms into you. their mannerisms turn
into truth- the way she holds her favorite coffee mug,
the way she laughs, the way she smells, the way her lips
curl after certain words. all of the simple things
suddenly become gigantic things and light up the world
before you like a flame thrown into the clouds.
what a breathtaking display. the way
the earth begins to dissolve in your periphery
and a human being replaces it.

no matter what they tell you-
a person is a universe when truly
loved and anything less is not
love at all. ~ Christopher Poindexter

Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice. The impossible has been achieved; the duologue of author with Author is consummated. And now forever through the ages the song expands, warming all hearts, penetrating all minds. At the periphery the world is dying away; at the center it glows like a live coal. In the great solar heart of the universe the golden birds are gathered in unison. There it is forever dawn, forever peace, harmony and communion. Man does not look to the sun in vain; he demands light and warmth not for the corpse which he will one day discard but for his inner being. His greatest desire is to burn with ecstasy, to commerge his little flame with the central fire of the universe. If he accords the angels wings so that they may come to him with messages of peace, harmony and radiance from worlds beyond, it is only to nourish his own dreams of flight, to sustain his own belief that he will one day reach beyond himself, and on wings of gold. One creation matches another; in essence they are all alike. The brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alik ~ Henry Miller

Presence is about how every action can arise from the quality, which we call awareness – the presence of our inner being, the presence of our soul.
It is a large difference between working with people from the inner being and working with people from duty or a specific technique. Through working from the inner being, we can touch the soul of the other person, while we can only touch the personality of the other person, his surface and periphery, if we just work from a technique. ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

She remained silent. There was nothing left to say. He'd said it all the night before. He had to end it. He could never leave his wife. And, in fact, she had known this. Although she loved him - and truly she did - he wasn't hers. He belonged to his wife. She'd earned him. It didn't matter that he was her first love or that she was his passion. It didn't matter that they had loved one another for more than half their lives. It didn't matter that he had married his wife on the rebound. It didn't matter that he didn't love the woman. It didn't even matter that they had turned into some soap-opera cliche. He was married to someone else and that meant that she was leftovers and destined to remain on the periphery in the shadow of another woman's marriage. But no more. She was well and truly sick of it. ~ Anna McPartlin

In my dream it was very dark, and what dim light there was seemed to be radiating from Edward's skin. I couldn't see his face, just his back as he walked away from me, leaving me in the blackness. No matter how fast I ran, I couldn't catch up to him; no matter how loud I called, he never turned. Troubled, I woke in the middle of the night and couldn't sleep again for what seemed like a very long time. After that, he was in my dreams nearly every night, but always on the periphery, never within reach. ~ Stephenie Meyer

As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folk-ishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among these unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated. Tailor ~ Milton Sanford Mayer

I've been out on the periphery. ~ Thomas Dolby

The child is born with a Self but not with an ego. The child develops the ego. As he becomes more and more social and related, ego develops. This ego is just on your periphery where you are related with others - just on the boundary of your being. So ego is the periphery of your being, and Self is the center. The child is born with a Self, but unaware. He is a Self, but he is not conscious of the Self. ~ Rajneesh

An amoeba is a formless thing which takes many shapes. It moves by thrusting out an arm, and flowing into the arm. It multiplies by pulling itself in two, without permanently diminishing the original. So with words. A meaning may develop on the periphery of the body of meanings associated with a word, and shortly this tentacle-meaning has grown to such proportions that it dwarfs all other meanings. ~ Charlton Laird

At present, however, science, spurred on by its powerful delusion, is hurrying unstoppably to its limits, where the optimism hidden in the essence oflogic will founder and break up. For there is an infinite number ofpoints on the periphery ofthe circle ofscience, and while we have no way of foreseeing how the circle could ever be completed, a noble and gifted man inevitably encounters, before the mid-point of his existence, boundary points on the periphery like this, where he stares into that which cannot be illuminated. When, to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form ofknowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and as medicine."
Friedrich Nietzsche, "Foreword to Richard Wagner" in The Birth of Tragedy, ed. R. Geuss & R. Speirs, Cambridge, 2007, 163. (p.114) ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

was one of those large, under-lit places that seemed to recede into shadow at the periphery, and in the murky middle ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning paper too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims. ~ Michael Herr

Manila is a city of extremes. The poor are very poor and the rich very rich. They live side by side. The rich live in sprawling houses in residential subdivisions with fancy names like Green Meadows, White Plains, Corinthian Plaza, Bel Air, San Lorenzo, Magallanes and the very exclusive Forbes Park, a leafy enclave that was home to the famous Manila Polo Club. The poor are not far from sight. They live in little pockets on the periphery of these affluent subdivisions. A constant reminder to the rich that there is another side to life. ~ Arlene J. Chai

They travelled crosstown now; the cab could rush fast down each block of the continuous alley, pausing only at the intersections where, to the right, canyonniched, the rumor of Grandlieu Street swelled and then faded in repetitive and indistinguishable turmoil, flicking on and past as though the cab ran along the rimless periphery of a ghostly wheel spoked with light and sound. ~ William Faulkner

But too many kids get to college and try to collapse it, to make it as comfortable and recognizable as possible. They replicate the friends and friendships they've previously enjoyed. They join groups that perpetuate their high school cliques. Concerned with establishing a "network" they seek out peers with aspirations identical to their own. In doing so, they frequently default to a clannishness that too easily becomes a lifelong habit. ....Open your laptops . Delete at least one of every four bookmarks. Replace it with something entirely different, even anti ethical. Go to twitter, Facebook etc start falling or connecting with views that diverge from your own. Conduct your social lives along the same lines, mixing it up. Do not go only to the campus basketball games....wander beyond the periphery of campus, and not to find equally enchanted realms-if you study abroad, don't choose the destination for its picturesqueness-but to see something else. ~ Frank Bruni

It took strength to notice things, sometimes, when those things were hidden away in dark places, stuck on the edges of the periphery. Strength to point to them and say that matters enough that I need to do something about it, especially when no one else blinked over them or everyone else forgot they were important. ~ Therese Walsh

Bandara was not an easy place to return to: it could hide from the common worlds whose periphery it inhabited. But Bandara never had, in all its years, completely disappeared. ~ Janet Morris

A simple rule of thumb is to shop the periphery of the grocery store - that's where you'll find meat, fish, dairy, and vegetables. Choose high-quality protein such as healthy, grass-fed beef and lamb and organic chicken and pork, and eat them in moderation. ~ Suzanne Somers

Horror is the awakening of repressed knowledge, something that you have known all along but kept at the periphery of awareness so that life can go on. ~ Matthew De Abaitua

If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power, and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the centre, because the centre is built on existing knowledge. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America
as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong. ~ D.H. Lawrence

A city can only be reconstructed in the form of urban quarters. A large or a small city can only be reorganized as a large or a small number of urban quarters; as a federation of autonomous quarters. Each quarter must have its own center, periphery and limit. Each quarter must be a city within a city. ~ Leon Krier

I prefer to linger on the periphery before making a commitment. ~ George Meyer

In years since he has rarely gone back to those old memories. As he does now, in the tavern near Harvard College, he's startled to find that the muddy whirl has been swept away. The mental pan has been churning for fifty years, sorting the dirt and sand to the periphery and throwing it off. Most of the memories are simply gone. All that remain are a few wee nuggets. It's not plain to Daniel why these impressions have stayed, while others, which seemed as or more important to him at the time they happened, have gone away. But if the gold-panning similitude is faithful, it means that these memories matter more than the ones that have flown. For gold stays in the pan's center because of its density; it has more matter (whatever that means) in a given extent than anything else. ~ Neal Stephenson

Dr. Grant was right, the feeling no longer swallows her. Bela lives on its periphery, she takes it in at a distance. The way her grandmother, sitting on a terrace in Tollygunge, used to spend her days overlooking a lowland, a pair of ponds. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Purchase items that can be made into several meals, like a whole roasted chicken, or bag of sweet potatoes, and shop the periphery of the grocery store, avoiding the middle aisles full of processed and higher-priced foods. ~ Cat Cora

Believing time is on our side is difficult because the lens of our lives is too narrowly focused. We see only what is in our direct view, whether trials or bliss. We hold so tightly to the positive experiences for fear we won't have another just as good and those that are negative we hope will disappear.
With our vision set to the crown of our nose, we miss being exposed to a world of possibility lying in the vastness of our periphery. ~ Tina Leigh

Then ego goes on growing, because the society needs you as an ego, not as a Self. The Self is irrelevant for the society; your periphery is meaningful. And there are many problems. The ego can be taught and the ego can be made docile and the ego can be forced to be obedient. The ego can be made to adjust, but not the Self. The Self cannot be taught, the Self cannot be forced. The Self is intrinsically rebellious, individual. It cannot be made a part of society. ~ Rajneesh

When I began to work with people almost 22 years ago, it was an insight for me that I really cared about the other person, and that it was this love that was communicated beyond the words to the other person. One of my course participants – who is a teacher – described this very beautifully when he said that he was impressed by my intuition and by my way of conducting therapeutic work – or, as he would rather call this, "giving insights into love". Love is what allows us to go beyond the surface of the other person and to touch his inner being, his inner essence. Without love, it is only possible to reach the personality of the other person, to reach the surface and periphery of the other person. ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

In the years of its rise the movement little by little brought the community's attitude toward the teacher around from respect and envy to resentment, from trust and fear to suspicion. The development seems to have been inherent; it needed no planning and had none. As the Nazi emphasis on nonintellectual virtues (patriotism, loyalty, duty, purity, labor, simplicity, "blood," "folkishness") seeped through Germany, elevating the self-esteem of the "little man," the academic profession was pushed from the very center to the very periphery of society. Germany was preparing to cut its own head off. By 1933 at least five of my ten friends (and I think six or seven) looked upon "intellectuals" as unreliable and, among those unreliables, upon the academics as the most insidiously situated. ~ Milton Sanford Mayer

Have a friend hold a handful of colored markers or highlighters out to his side. Keep your gaze fixed on his nose, and now try to name the order of the colors in his hand. The results are surprising: even if you're able to report that there are some colors in your periphery, you won't be able to accurately determine their order. ~ David Eagleman

She fell asleep rapidly, swimming through a haze of pleasant images... walking through the forest in Hampshire... dangling her feet in a cool pond on a hot day... pausing in the kissing gate, while the smell of sun-warmed meadowsweet rose thickly to her nostrils. She closed her eyes and tilted her chin upward, relishing the sultry rays, while a butterfly's wings brushed lightly against her cheek. Entranced by the delicate tickle, she held very still. The silken strokes moved over the tip of her nose, the sensitive periphery of her upper lip, the tender corners of her mouth.
Searching blindly, she lifted her face to the brushes of warmth and was rewarded by a gentle pressure that opened her lips and drew a moan from the upper part of her lungs. Lord Sydney was standing with her in the kissing gate, his arms trapping her against the painted ribs of latticework. His mouth searched hers so gently, his body firm against hers, and she writhed in a mute plea for him to hold her more tightly. Seeming to know exactly what she wanted, he pushed his knee into her skirts, right against the place that felt swollen and yearning. Gasping, she curled her fingers in his glossy hair, and he whispered for her to relax, that he would take care of her, satisfy her-
"Oh." Blinking hard, she stirred from the sensuous dream as she realized that she was not alone. The bed curtains had been drawn aside, and Nick Gentry's long body was entangled with hers. One large hand was cupped beneath he ~ Lisa Kleypas

Whenever the periphery is in danger of displacing the center, we are not far removed from idolatry. The ~ D. A. Carson

We live our lives in the eye of God, and not at the periphery but at the center of His vision, His concern. ~ M. Scott Peck

I love being on the periphery with a group of people who have the same values that I do. People who don't get off on fame, who just like the process of making movies and thrive. ~ Kristen Stewart

True progress lies in the direction of decentralization, both territorial and functional, in the development of the spirit of local and personal initiative, and of free federation from the simple to the compound, in lieu of the present hierarchy from the centre to the periphery. ~ Peter Kropotkin

It was peak season and packed to the rafters and Harry presumed that was why it was so difficult to gain eye contact with the waiters. "The waiters here are like the planet Pluto," Andrew said. "They orbit on the periphery, only making an appearance every twentieth year, and even then are impossible to glimpse with the naked eye. ~ Jo Nesbo

You must, in order that it shall speak to you, take a thing during a certain time as the only one that exists, as the only phenomenon which through your diligent and exclusive love finds itself set down in the center of the universe. . . . Don't be frightened at the expression "fate" … I call fate all external events (illnesses, for example, included) which can inevitably step in to interrupt and annihilate a disposition of mind and training that is by nature solitary. . . .

That went through me like an arrow, when I learned it, but like a flaming arrow that, while it pierced my heart through, left it in a conflagration of clear sight. There are few artists in our day who grasp this stubbornness, this vehement obstinacy. But I believe that without it one remains always at the periphery of art, which is rich enough as it is to allow us pleasant discoveries, but at which, nevertheless, we halt only as a player at the green table who, while he now and again succeeds with a "coup", remains none the less at the mercy of chance, which is nothing but the docile and dexterous ape of the law. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

May occasionally pay lip-service to their value, but it ultimately has no real use for artists, dancers, poets, self-sufficient farmers, tree lovers, devoted followers of what it views as non-materialist cults - Christian or otherwise - handicraft workers, makers of their own beer, or, for that matter, stay-at-home moms and dads, all of whom, when they endure at all, do so at the margins and on the periphery of the social economy. ~ John Taylor Gatto

I seem to have been everywhere in the last 30 years, maybe not in the epicenter but flying around the periphery of extraordinary events and equally extraordinary people. ~ Rupert Everett

While other industries have suffered, the nonprofit arts world continues to build in strength while it encourages the growth of innumerable small businesses on its periphery, thereby creating more jobs. ~ Louise Slaughter

There are big questions science doesn't answer, such as why is there something rather than nothing? There can't be a scientific answer to that because it's the answer that precedes science. There are all sorts of questions like that that which at the periphery of scientic inquiry but which wiggle in the mind like worms: the question "what am I, what is this word 'I'"? Does it refer to anything? If you try to capture the "I", you don't capture it, you capture the object, in which case it's a nothing, but it's a nothing on which everything depends. But this nothing on which everything depends thinks of itself as free. This is a philosophical question that worries everyone, but you can't formulate it. ~ Roger Scruton

Let me be very clear. For me geography does not exist! I strongly object to the whole concept of "foreign literature"...and speaking of national identity: that is how dictatorships get started! In literature there is no periphery and no center; there are only writers. The problem is not geographic but rather numeric. In the 19th century there were at least thirty literary geniuses in Russia, Germany, France, England and the United States. Today we are lucky if there are five writers of that caliber in the whole world...Where does one find good literature today? Mostly in third world countries, because adversity, isolation, combat provide good working conditions. It is harder to be a good writer in a so-called "civilized" country, in the so-called "democracies. ~ Antonio Lobo Antunes

If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences,that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, i perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood. This relatedness from center to center - instead of that from periphery to periphery - is 'central relatedness'. ~ Erich Fromm

Indeed, within Castro's periphery there evolved a bizarre mutation known oxymoronically as "liberation theology," where priests and even some bishops adopted "alternative" liturgies enshrining the ludicrous notion that Jesus of Nazareth was really a dues-paying socialist. For a combination of good and bad reasons (Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a man of courage and principle, in the way that some Nicaraguan "base community" clerics were not), the papacy put this down as a heresy. Would that it could have condemned fascism and Nazism in the same unhesitating and unambiguous tones. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Tangier and Lucy were the same, I thought. Both unsolvable riddles that refused to leave me in peace. And I had tired of it - of the not knowing, of always feeling as though I were on the outside of things, just on the periphery. ~ Christine Mangan

The desire to "do more in less time" is not a neutral force in our culture; it is the handmaiden of miserable experts, specialists, and leaders. Not everyone has rushed to become efficient. Something else exists on the periphery: an inefficient utopia, a culture of consensus, collectives, and do-it-yourself ethics. A place where time is not bought, sold, or leased and no clock is the final arbiter of our worth. For many people in North America, the problem is not just poverty but lack of time to do the things that are actually meaningful. This is not a symptom of personal failures but the consequence of a time-obsessed society. Today, desire for efficiency springs from the scarcity model, which is the foundation of capitalism. Time is seen as a limited resource when we get caught up in meaningless jobs, mass-produced entertainment, and – the common complaint of activists – tedious meanings. ~ Curious George Brigade

The strength and vitality of an empire is frequently due to the new aristocracy from the periphery. ~ Ronald Syme

For the life of me I can't understand why BP couldn't go in at the ocean floor, maybe 10 feet lateral to the - around the periphery, drill a few holes, and put a little ammonium nitrate, some dynamite in those holes, and detonate that dynamite, and seal that leak. Seal it permanently. ~ Phil Gingrey

We are the voices in the shadows,
Between the light and shade,
Betwixt life and restful death,
In the dark periphery of the unseen.

We're here,
At the edges.
We are the villainous punished,
The innocent murdered or abandoned,
Our lives ended by foul means, or unspeakable deeds.
We are your lovers long gone; your siblings forsaken.

Can you hear us?
At the edges

From the Foreword of Cautionary Tales - by Emmanuelle de Maupassant ~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. At the other end of the continent Felix was lying in a hospital bed, asleep, surrounded by kin - Soma and the boys, the ghosts of the Chileans he had known, the disappeared, the still-here. Winkler had a single memory of an infant girl at a window. Faces in a dream, phantoms in the periphery. If he had learned anything it was that family was not so much what you were given as what you were able ~ Anthony Doerr

Whenever you are in anger, remember yourself. In that very remembering the focus changes, the gestalt changes. You become more and more centred. Anger remains there just on the periphery of your being, but you know now that it is separate from you. You are not angry, you are only a witness to it. Now it is up to you to choose to be angry or not to be angry. You are no more identified; hence the freedom to choose. ~ Rajneesh

But private lands development around the periphery of the parks - Grand Teton and Yellowstone - is a crucial issue because if those private lands are transformed from open pastures, meadow, forest land to suburbs, to little ranchettes, to shopping malls, to roads, to Starbucks - if those places are all settled for the benefit of humans, then the elk are not going to be able to migrate in and out of Yellowstone Park anymore. And if the elk can't migrate into the park, then that creates problems for the wolves, for the grizzlies, for a lot of other creatures. ~ David Quammen

When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It was at Long Huruk that we encountered the vortex of the dream time of which we had so far only touched the periphery, for this was the semi-nomadic community of mystics and dream wanderers. ~ Lawrence Blair

But the truth is always a lot fuzzier, hiding in soft focus on the periphery. ~ Jonathan Tropper

Dream extravagantly, for God has imbued us with ample imagination to dream out to and across the very periphery of the impossible. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I traveled from city to city in those days, and the view from within the ghettos was terrible and terrifying. While white people in the periphery were arming themselves against the day when they would have to defend themselves from attack by blacks (and really believed someone was fomenting a racial war in which black people would rise up and attack them), black people mostly without arms huddled inside the ghettos feeling that they were surrounded by armed whites. ~ John Howard Griffin

To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. ~ Eugene B. Sledge

Rule No. 12: shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle. ~ Michael Pollan

When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the "suspension of disbelief" and activity of the imagination that are available in novels and movies. ~ John Granger

This strategy, which was then used as the template for the rest of the European periphery, turning the majority of European states into what I jokingly refer to as Bailoutistan, was always going to backfire on the European economy. Tim Geithner and Jack Lew, his successor in the US Treasury Department, understood this well. They shared the concern that what started in Greece in 2010, with the combination of an absurd bailout and a hideous level of austerity, has put Europe into a position that undermines America's recovery and threatens the prospects of China, Latin America, even India and Africa. ~ Yanis Varoufakis

All right, I am often brash, rude and brutally direct. Someday I'm going to die and I don't have time to toe-dance around the periphery of hatred. ~ Mel Brooks

They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood.
... There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all. ~ David Levithan

When we are not realized, we are moving on the periphery, like a wheel and we are disturbed. But a realized soul is on the axis, which is silent. So he has the peace within himself. ~ Nirmala Srivastava

What did make me a little uneasy was that I often caught sight of him studying me in my periphery. I replayed what I'd said over and over in my mind, trying to figure out if there'd been anything to warrant such attention. ~ Richelle Mead

Yet every democratic government is reluctant to face the fact. Reservists and citizen-soldiers stand ready, in every free nation, to stand to the colors and die in holocaust, the big war. Reservists and citizen-soldiers remain utterly reluctant to stand and die in anything less. None want to serve on the far frontiers, or to maintain lonely, dangerous vigils on the periphery of Asia. There has been every indication that mass call-ups for cold war moves may result in mass disaffection. ~ T.R. Fehrenbach

I can look back and see that I've spent much of my life in a cloud of things that have tended to push "being kind" to the periphery. Things like: Anxiety. Fear. Insecurity. Ambition. The mistaken belief that enough accomplishment will rid me of all that anxiety, fear, insecurity, and ambition. The belief that if I can only accrue enough - enough accomplishment, money, fame - my neuroses will disappear. I've been in this fog certainly since, at least, my own graduation day. Over the years I've felt: Kindness, sure - but first let me finish this semester, this degree, this book; let me succeed at this job, and afford this house, and raise these kids, and then, finally, when all is accomplished, I'll get started on the kindness. Except it never all gets accomplished. It's a cycle that can go on ... well, forever. ~ George Saunders

This, then, is the global significance of Chungking Mansions. It is a building of the periphery within a city of the core, a city located between the developing world's manufacturing hub and its poorest nether regions. It is a ghetto of middle-class striving within a city of wealthier middle-class striving, viewing its denizens with fear and scorn yet letting business as usual be the law of the day. Chungking ~ Gordon Mathews

The arts, instead of quaking along the periphery of our policy concerns, must push boldly into the core of policy. The arts are a response to our individuality and our nature and help to shape our identity. The arts are not a frill and should not be treated as such. They have the potential to become the driving force for healing division and divisiveness. ~ Barbara Jordan

Gray waited a full verse before approaching her, prowling around her periphery and coming to rest behind her right shoulder. A few of the men gave him friendly nods, but most were too absorbed in their spirits and song to pay him any mind.
"What are you doing?" she asked, flicking him a glance through the swaying lamplight.
"Who, me?" he murmured. "I'm simply leaning against the foremast. You know, this tall bit of timber you weren't to go past."
She sipped her drink.
Gray pushed off the mast and crouched at her side. If she'd turn and look at him, they would be eye-to-eye. But she didn't. "The better question is, what the hell are you doing?"
"I'm enjoying myself," she said lightly, taking another drink. "I suggest you do the same." She passed the tankard to him and applauded with wild enthusiasm as the song came to its tuneless end.
Gray peered at the half-empty tankard, then lifted it to his nose and sniffed. Straight, unadulterated rum, the girl was drinking. That would explain the enthusiasm. Her applause concluded, she snatched the tankard back and downed a swallow to do a sailor proud.
Bloody hell. Gray suspected the only thing worse than watching over a prim governess would be watching over a soused one. ~ Tessa Dare

I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male "fear of women" and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women's sexual appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional-therefore economic-access to women only on women's terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix. ~ Adrienne Rich

As far back as I can remember, I've utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes. ~ Emil M. Cioran

The war between the centrifuge of knowledge and the centripetal pull of power remains the prime conflict in all economies. Reconciling the two impulses is a new economics, an economics that puts free will and the innovating entrepreneur not on the periphery but at the center of the system. It is an economics of surprise that distributes power as it extends knowledge. It is an economics of disequilibrium and disruption that tests its inventions in the crucible of a competitive marketplace. It is an economics that accords with the constantly surprising fluctuations of our lives. ~ George Gilder

Time and space recede and blast away like a universe expanding forever outward, and leaving only darkness and the two of us on its periphery, darkness and breathing and touch. ~ Lauren Oliver

Watching this little scene makes my throat ache. It seems an apt metaphor for the role most men play--even in egalitarian modern marriages--as quasi-outsiders in their own families. Of course, men have always contributed importantly to the family, and our wives and children would miss us if we were gone. But there's also a tacit understanding that we are the expendable ones: if something evil comes through the front door, everyone knows whose job it is to die guarding the family's retreat out the back. Men are a little on the periphery of family life, cut off from the biologically precious mother and children as though by an invisible pane of glass. ~ Jonathan Gottschall

If there was a God up there, He must be laughing His head off at a human race capable of making atomic bombs and building artificial intelligence, but still uncomfortable with their own mortality and unable to sort out what to do with their dead. How pathetic it was to try to relegate death to the periphery of life when death was at the centre of everything. ~ Elif Shafak

When we live moment to moment, we place ourselves at the center of life, where infinite wisdom abides, rather than on the periphery, where things are forever changing and we are susceptible to the vagaries of the world. It is in our awareness each moment of our oneness with God that our inner peace and greatest strength lie. ~ Susan L. Taylor

Beyond the speculative and often fraudulent froth that characterizes much of neoliberal financial manipulation, there lies a deeper process that entails the springing of 'the debt trap' as a primary means of accumulation by dispossession. Crisis creation, management, and manipulation on the world stage has evolved into the fine art of deliberative redistribution of wealth from poor countries to the rich. I documented the impact of Volcker's interest rate increase on Mexico earlier. While proclaiming its role as a noble leader organizing 'bail-outs' to keep global capital accumulation on track, the US paved the way to pillage the Mexican economy. This was what the US Treasury–Wall Street–IMF complex became expert at doing everywhere. Greenspan at the Federal Reserve deployed the same Volcker tactic several times in the 1990s. Debt crises in individual countries, uncommon during the 1960s, became very frequent during the 1980s and 1990s. Hardly any developing country remained untouched, and in some cases, as in Latin America, such crises became endemic. These debt crises were orchestrated, managed, and controlled both to rationalize the system and to redistribute assets. Since 1980, it has been calculated, 'over fifty Marshall Plans (over $4.6 trillion) have been sent by the peoples at the Periphery to their creditors in the Center'. 'What a peculiar world', sighs Stiglitz, 'in which the poor countries are in effect subsidizing the richest. ~ David Harvey

More and more the world resembles an entomologist's dream. The earth is moving out of its orbit, the axis has shifted; from the north the snow blows down in huge knife-blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the transverse sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn belt the fetal world is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch by inch the deltas are drying out and the river beds are smooth as glass. A new day is dawning, a metallurgical day, when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow ore. As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows blurred; osmosis there still is, and here and there articulation, but at the periphery the veins are all varicose, at the periphery the light waves bend and the sun bleeds like a broken rectum. ~ Henry Miller

But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind - as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Happiness comes from accepting the present situation, whether it's something you wish to savor as long as possible or change as quickly as you can. Neither is possible without acceptance as the starting point, because without acceptance, you are living on the periphery of your life. There at the edges, you can't fully enjoy the god stuff or do anything about the rest ~ Victoria Moran

Neither the circle without the line, nor the line without the point, can be artificially produced. It is, therefore, by virtue of the point and the Monad that all things commence to emerge in principle. That which is affected at the periphery, however large it may be, cannot in any way lack the support of the central point. ~ John Dee

Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action. ~ Daniel Goleman

Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot periphery, battered by a corrupt and inept civic and religious establishment, troubled by a past that it barely understood - to the contemporary eye, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City looks oddly familiar. In its dystopic way, it was an amazingly contemporary place, unlike any other then on the planet. It was the first twenty-first-century city, the first of today's modern, globalized megalopolises. ~ Charles C. Mann

...the centrality of competitiveness as the key to growth is a recurrent EU motif. Two decades of EC directives on increasing competition in every area, from telecommunications to power generation to collateralizing wholesale funding markets for banks, all bear the same ordoliberal imprint. Similarly, the consistent focus on the periphery states' loss of competitiveness and the need for deep wage and cost reductions therein, while the role of surplus countries in generating the crisis is utterly ignored, speaks to a deeply ordoliberal understanding of economic management. Savers, after all, cannot be sinners. Similarly, the most recent German innovation of a constitutional debt brake (Schuldenbremse) for all EU countries regardless of their business cycles or structural positions, coupled with a new rules-based fiscal treaty as the solution to the crisis, is simply an ever-tighter ordo by another name.

If states have broken the rules, the only possible policy is a diet of strict austerity to bring them back into conformity with the rules, plus automatic sanctions for those who cannot stay within the rules. There are no fallacies of composition, only good and bad policies. And since states, from an ordoliberal viewpoint, cannot be relied upon to provide the necessary austerity because they are prone to capture, we must have rules and an independent monetary authority to ensure that states conform to the ordo imperative; hence, the ECB. Then, and only then, will grow ~ Mark Blyth

As for garden photographers, how differently they see things. With what ease the camera seems to compose a picture of great beauty with its discriminating lens. The naked eye can't censor some ugly sight on the periphery of vision; the photographer takes the perfect shot and picks for us just what we need to see. ~ Mirabel Osler

My sin murdered Him. And out of this self-loathing shame borne of the understanding that I could perpetrate such a heinous act, I am barely able to raise my head sufficiently to ask what crazed insanity would prompt Jesus to walk out of an empty tomb for the single purpose of pursuing a decaying soul that murdered Him? And I would be wise to consider that the question itself is asked only because I have yet to touch the barest periphery of God's love despite the fact that because of an empty tomb it stands right in front of me. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Use all your suffering for meditation, and soon you will come to know that the suffering disappears because the energy starts moving inwards. It is not moving to the periphery, to the suffering, you are not feeding your suffering. It looks illogical, but this is the whole conclusion of all the mystics of the world: that you feed your suffering and you enjoy it in a subtle way, you don't want to be well - there must be some investment in it. ~ Rajneesh

My interest, perhaps, came out of the trauma of being a young immigrant in this country and constantly feeling my "resident alien" status. I remember trying to learn English on kindergarten playgrounds. I tried hard to be a convincing American but it was a losing battle. I was labeled weird and that tag never left me - all through high school, I was always the oddball. It was not always an easy path - I just had to tell myself that one day, being on the periphery would become an asset (and I think it finally has, as a creative adult). ~ Porochista Khakpour

When Putin was preparing to take back the presidency in Moscow, he published an essay in the fall of 2011 in a Russian newspaper announcing plans to regain lost influence among former Soviet republics and create "a powerful supra-national union capable of becoming a pole in the modern world." Putin said that this new Eurasian Union would "change the geopolitical and geo-economic configuration of the entire continent." Some dismissed these words as campaign bluster, but I thought they revealed Putin's true agenda, which was effectively to "re-Sovietize" Russia's periphery. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Sometimes you look up and there just seems to be so many more stars that ever before. More. They burn brighter and they shine longer and they never vanish into your periphery when you turn your head. It's as if they come out for us and to remind us that their light took so long to come to us, that if we never had the patience to wait, we never would have seen them here, tonight, like this.
That as much as it hurts, sometimes it's all you can do, wait, endure and keep shining, knowing that eventually, your light will reach where it is supposed to reach and shine for who it is supposed to shine for.
It is never easy, but it is always worth it. ~ Tyler Knott Gregson

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

It is the growing periphery of the Arab world - the masses at its margins, not its feeble and decaying center - that is shaping the future of the region. ~ Wadah Khanfar