The Threshold Quotes

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals. ~ Susan Sontag

Go in peace," I said to him; "bear no ill-will to me, for Necessity yields to no man: and do not complain of me to our mother, for her blood is on your head as well as mine.
If the gods had not forbidden it, my brother, I would put you to sleep before I left you, for night comes on; this is an empty place, and the clouds look dark upon the mountains.
But the blood of kindred is not to be washed away; and when a man has once felt the breath of the Honoured Ones upon his neck, he will not bid them across the threshold. So forgive me, and suffer what must be. The clouds are heavy; if the gods love you, before morning there will be snow. ~ Mary Renault

There was someone in his little attic room. Geralt knew it before he even reached the door, sensing it through the barely perceptible vibration of his medallion. He blew out the oil lamp which had lit his path up the stairs, pulled the dagger from his boot, slipped it into the back of his belt and pressed the door handle. The room was dark. But not for a witcher. He was deliberately slow in crossing the threshold; he closed the door behind him carefully. The next second he dived at the person sitting on his bed, crushed them into the linen, forced his forearm under their chin and reached for his dagger. He didn't pull it out. Something wasn't right. "Not a bad start," she said in a muffled voice, lying motionless beneath him. "I expected something like this, but I didn't think we'd both be in bed so quickly. Take your hand from my throat please." "It's ~ Andrzej Sapkowski

I want to build you a house with my bare hands and carry you over the threshold. I want too cook for you every evening and bring you tea in bed in the mornings. I want to read with you in front of an open fire, sipping a glass of wine. I want to drive you to the beach and lie next to you in the sun. I may not be a man of means, bit I want to take care of you as best I can. ~ Catherine Sanderson

Candlelight flickered in the adjacent bedroom. She followed the ambient warmth to the threshold and paused there, marveling at what she saw. Lucan's austere bedroom had been transformed into something out of a dream. Four tall black pillar candles set into intricate silver sconces burned in each corner. Red silk draped the bed. On the floor before the fireplace was a cushioned next of fluffy pillows and even more crimson silk. It looked so romantic, so inviting.
A room intended for lovemaking.
She took a step farther inside. Behind her, the door closed softly on its own.
No, not quite on its own. Lucan was there, standing on the other side of the room, watching her. His hair was damp from a shower. He wore a loosely tied, satiny red robe that skated around his bare calves, and there was a heated look in his eyes that melted her where she stood.
"For you," he said, indicating the romantic setting. "For us tonight. I want things to be special for you."
Gabrielle was moved, instantly aroused by the sight of him, but she couldn't bear to make love the way things had been left between them.
"When I left tonight, I wasn't going to come back," she told him from the safety of distance. If she went any closer, she didn't think she'd have the strength to say what had to be said. "I can't do this anymore, Lucan. I need things from you that you can't give me."
"Name them." It was a soft command, but still a command. He moved toward her with careful ste ~ Lara Adrian

In a well-run mental household there ought to be a thorough cleaning at the threshold of consciousness a few times a year. ~ Karl Kraus

I started to my feet as suddenly as if he had struck me. If I had been a man, I would have knocked him down on the threshold of his own door, and have left his house, never on any earthly consideration to enter it again. But I was only a woman - and I loved his wife so dearly! ~ Wilkie Collins

From his angle, the curtain seems to form itself into a shrouded, wavering figure, indescribably terrifying in its very indistinctness. Something waiting, hovering on the threshold of the visible world. Some half-embodied fear gradually assuming a hideous outer form. ~ Christopher Isherwood

You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive ~ Abraham Verghese

We are ever on the threshold of new journeys and new discoveries. Can you imagine the excitement of the Wright brothers on the morning of that first flight? The anticipation of Jonas Salk as he analyzed the data that demonstrated a way to prevent polio? ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

And it was no shame to her that she so dreamed. It was no shame that she called before her, one by one, those who had asked her to cross with them the threshold (of marriage) and those who might still ask her. It was no shame that, while her heart said always, "no," she still waited - waited for one whom she knew not, but only knew that she would know him when he came. And it was no shame to her that, even while this was so, she saw herself in the years to come a wife and mother. ~ Harold Bell Wright

At the threshold of every transition in our lives the devil send a spirit of fear. Therefore be strong and very courageous! ~ Christine Caine

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past. ~ Virginia Woolf

Even here, in the weight machine of a train station, they try to hoodwink us. Here, on the threshold of a man's freedom, just before he boards a train to a new life, these flashing fortune machines are the final alarm bell of the Rooster Coop. ~ Aravind Adiga

In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

While personal income in the U.S. more than doubled between i 96o and the 19gos in constant dollars, the proportion of people saying they are very happy remained a steady 30 percent. One conclusion that the findings seem to justify is that beyond the threshold of poverty, additional resources do not appreciably improve the chances of being happy. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

It is not unprofessional to give free legal advice, but advertising that the first visit will be free is a bit like a fox telling chickens he will not bite them until they cross the threshold of the hen house. ~ Warren E. Burger

In reality," he told Paulina, after knowing her a short time, "endings are unworthy of art. Works of art are always unfinished. Whoever creates them is never sure of having finished them. The same is true of all the best things in life. Goethe, even though he was a German, was right about this: 'Every beginning is beautiful, but one must stop on the threshold. ~ Angeles Mastretta

It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived. "Augrh!" said Father Wolf. "It is time to hunt again." He was going to spring down hill when a little shadow with a bushy tail crossed the threshold and whined: "Good luck go with you, O Chief of the Wolves. And good luck and strong white teeth go with noble children that they may never forget the hungry in this world. ~ Rudyard Kipling

It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and it is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium - as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom - well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining. ~ Primo Levi

On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, 'one of the weightiest concepts man has ever formed,' once a dogma, in the course of time a hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction, yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken. ~ Havelock Ellis

Falling in love is like religious conversion. It goes on for a long time below the threshold before it reaches consciousness. ~ Helen McCloy

We live at the threshold of a universal recognition that the human being is not mere matter, but a potent, energetic field of consciousness. Modalities of the past millennium are quickly giving way to breakthrough technologies wherein we heal ourselves at the level of all true healing, which is spirit. ~ Michael Beckwith

She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. ~ Thomas Pynchon

We stand on the threshold of a twilight-whether morning or evening we do not know. One is followed by the night, the other heralds the dawn. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I still didn't know quite what the witches were capable of. The threshold could be booby-trapped or enchanted. I could be walking into a cage fight with a demon. Hell, she could open the door with a Glock 9 in her hand and put a bullet in my ear, or throw a cat at me, or call me a damn hippie. ~ Kevin Hearne

some even affirmed that they had passed the night across the threshold of the great door, in order to make sure that they should be the first to pass in. The crowd ~ Victor Hugo

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is. ~ Alan Kay

I always switch off from the business when I go across the threshold. Home is home, and I try to keep it that way. ~ John Caudwell

Never go in, miss. Never say a prayer at its door. If you are angry, do not seek revenge by the Laughing Maiden stone, or at the threshold of the Tombs. There be those who listen for oaths and vows, and them that takes it quite to heart. What may be said in innocence and ire becomes flesh and blood should it be uttered in such places. ~ Douglas Clegg

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforth in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Teach me the wilderness simplicity.
Help me to point to you, honestly and joyously,
as the threshold of all that really matters. ~ Calvin Miller

There was another thing I heartily disbelieved in - work. Work, it seemed to me even at the threshold of life, is an activity reserved for the dullard. It is the very opposite of creation, which is play ... The part of me which was given up to work, which enabled my wife and child to live in the manner which they unthinkingly demanded, this part of me which kept the wheel turning - a completely fatuous, ego-centric notion! - was the least part of me. I gave nothing to the world in fulfilling the function of breadwinner; the world exacted its tribute of me, that was all. ~ Henry Miller

The merging of two lives, the threshold of possibility: it's an energy unlike anything else. ~ Crystal Cestari

To understand anything is to find in it something which is our own, and it is the discovery of ourselves outside us which makes us glad. This relation of understanding is partial, but the relation of love is complete. In love the sense of difference is obliterated and the human soul fulfils its purpose in perfection, transcending the limits of itself and reaching across the threshold of the infinite. Therefore love is the highest bliss that man can attain to, for through it alone he truly knows that he is more than himself, and that he is at one with the All. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

I said, my phone."
I stand at the threshold and look in. The princess has her back to me, and Lor is beyond noticing anything. Ryodan and Barrons are another matter. They're too observant by far. There is also the small matter of the enormous possessiveness I feel where Barrons is concerned.
I step inside and place my palm on the interior panel.
Two males roar in unison.
"Ms. Lane, you will not close-"
"Mac, you will give me my f*ucking-"
The door hisses closed behind me. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Before Jesse could say another word, the bedroom door jerked open and Lucie's father stood on the threshold, looking alarmed.
"Lucie?" he said. "Did you call out? I thought I heard you."
Lucie tensed, but the expression in her father's blue eyes didn't change - mild worry mixed with curious puzzlement. He really couldn't see Jesse.
Jesse looked at her and, very irritatingly, shrugged as if to say, I told you so.
"No, Papa," she said. "Everything is all right."
He looked at the manuscript pages scattered all over the rug. "Spot of writer's block, Lulu?"
Jesse raised an eyebrow. Lulu? he mouthed.
Lucie considered whether it was possible to die of humiliation. She did not dare look at Jesse. ~ Cassandra Clare

If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as "truths" - that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of "the Son of God" does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an "eternal" fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the "kingdom of God," and of the "sonship of God." Nothing could be more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a person, of a "kingdom of God" that is to come, of a "kingdom of heaven" beyond, and of a "son of God" as the second person of the Trinity. All this - if I may be forgiven the phrase - is like thrusting one's fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism.... But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols "Father" and "Son" - not, of course, to every one - : the word "Son" expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and "Father" expresses that feeling itself - the sensation of eternity and of perfection. - I am ashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian "f ~ Nietszche

Happiness is only the threshold to misery. When a friend refuses to share in joys. ~ Georg Ebers

For many men that stumble at the threshold are well foretold that danger lurks within. ~ William Shakespeare

He stopped and looked at her. "Your eyes are leaking."
"It's the flowers. They make me sneeze."
"Then let us be away from the garden. Open the door, love, if you will."
She obeyed, then froze halfway over the threshold. "What did you call me?"
"The first of countless endearments if you'll but stir yourself to hold our current course. ~ Lynn Kurland

Who says that I am dead
knows nought at all.
I am that is,
Two mice within Redwall.
The Warrior sleaps
Twixt Hall and Cavern Hole
I am that is,
Take on my mighty role ...
Look for the sword
In moonlight streaming forth
At night, when days first hour
Reflects the north
From o'er the threshold
Seek and you will see;
I am that is,
My sword shall wield for me. ~ Brian Jacques

How is it that disappointment arrives as soon as what you have desired for so long steps over the threshold? It's like finding the end of your wedding train dragging behind in the mud. ~ Camilla Gibb

Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new. ~ Edmund Waller

I was too much taken up with another interest to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which came an air of a keenness I had never breathed and of a taste stronger than wine. I had heard all my days of apparitions, but it was a different thing to have seen one and to know that I should in all likelihood see it familiarly, as I might say, again. I was on the lookout for it as a pilot for the flash of a revolving light and ready to generalise on the sinister subject, to answer for it to all and sundry that ghosts were much less alarming and much more amusing than was commonly supposed. There's no doubt that I was much uplifted. I couldn't get over the distinction conferred on me, the exception - in the way of mystic enlargement of vision - made in my favour.
("Sir Edmund Orme") ~ Henry James

The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is not sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold. ~ Ezra Pound

We may be happy but just don't know it yet. Many want to rebuke themselves for not finding the threshold of well being, since they simply haven't learnt to be nice to themselves and to enjoy the privileged twinklings of life. ("C'est quand le bonheur ?" ) ~ Erik Pevernagie

My world was one of only broken images, like I was standing always on the threshold of a mirror, unable to tell the reflection from the real. The shining city and the blasted heath-the truth lay somewhere between, a thin grey line, slender as the edge of knife. ~ Alexis Hall

I feel my disease, and I feel that my want of alarm and lively affecting conviction forms its most obstinate ingredient; I try to stir up the emotion, and feel myself harassed and distressed at the impotency of my own meditations. But why linger without the threshold in the face of a warm and urgent invitation? "Come unto me." Do not think it is your office to heal one part of the disease, and Christ's to heal the remainder. ~ Thomas Chalmers

Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don't want to part from it. He had given me a pill of cyanide, He and his wife and their son also carried such pills. We all lived with death, and I want you to know that one can fall in love with death. Whoever has loved death cannot love anything else any more. When the liberation came and they told me to leave, I didn't want to go. I clung to the threshold like an ox being dragged to the slaughter. ("Hanka") ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Magic happens on the threshold of the forbidden. ~ Maria Tatar

At times, we were forced to go through a history of dependence, unable to determine our own destiny. But today, we are at the threshold of a new turning point. ~ Roh Moo-hyun

I need to quit," Elvira announced. "I gotta turn in my resignation. I can't work with a man knowin' his capacity to give pleasure. I mean, I can work with a man guessin' his capacity to give pleasure but not knowin' it. This is it. I hit the threshold. I never understood TMI. In my opinion, no amount of information is too much information but I've found it. I'm here. ~ Kristen Ashley

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth. On ~ Charles Dickens

The light from the hallway spilled inside her bedroom. She'd barely stepped over the threshold when he caught her. Kenton spun her around and yanked her up in his arms. Two steps, and they were on the bed. Crashing down. Falling hard into the soft mattress.
He caged her arms over her head, holding them with one hand even as he took her mouth.
That other hand - yes! - drifted down her stomach and pushed between her legs. He'd find her wet, she knew it. One kiss, and she'd been wet for him. Creamy, hot. Ready. ~ Cynthia Eden

The unbroken realization that you are indivisible from the universe, from universal consciousness, from the source of everything - that you are that source, that there is no other, no second, nothing that is not part of that unity, except as transitory illusion. If you could maintain that realization at all times, through waking and sleeping states of consciousness, across the threshold of death itself, what would you be? ~ Daniel Pinchbeck

If you blink, you might miss it. You might miss the wet floor at the threshold, symbolically cleansing you before the meal begins. You might overlook the flower arrangement in the corner, a spare expression of the passing season. You might miss the scroll on the wall drawn with a single unbroken line, signaling the infinite continuity of nature. You might not detect the gentle current of young ginger rippling through the dashi, the extra sheet of Hokkaido kelp in the soup, the mochi that is made to look like a cherry blossom at midnight.
You might miss the water. ~ Matt Goulding

Forget the suffering You caused others. Forget the suffering Others caused you. The waters run and run, Springs sparkle and are done, You walk the earth you are forgetting. Sometimes you hear a distant refrain. What does it mean, you ask, who is singing? A childlike sun grows warm. A grandson and a great-grandson are born. You are led by the hand once again. The names of the rivers remain with you. How endless those rivers seem! Your fields lie fallow, The city towers are not as they were. You stand at the threshold mute. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

Why was I sent away?" "I don't know that answer, Lyssandra. You are going to have to ask Father." The library door swung open violently causing her to jump in surprise. Beyond the door was a furious Vincent. His hands were clenched in tight fists, and his onyx eyes were hard as granite as he stared at her brother. Fury radiated from him, and it looked like he wanted to rush over the threshold to attack Quinton, but something was holding him back. ~ Claire Grimes

stood for a while and looked about him, but when he had looked long enough he crossed the threshold and went within the precincts of the house. There he found all the chief people among the Phaeacians making their drink offerings to Mercury, which they always did the last thing before going away for the night. 61 He went straight through the court, still hidden by the cloak of darkness in which Minerva had enveloped him, till he reached Arete and King Alcinous; then he laid his hands upon the knees of the queen, and at that moment the miraculous darkness fell away from him and ~ Homer

There were still choices to be made, decisions to reach, actions to take. Many of them. But in one ... single declaration of intent, we stepped across the threshold of war. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Around two years of age, your child starts to develop a fascination with saying the word "no." Early childhood experts call this the threshold between the sensorimotor stage and the preoperational stage of cognitive development. The rest of us call it "the terrible twos. ~ Anonymous

THERE WAS ALWAYS a boy in your life that common sense and the prayers of parents told you to stay away from: fast talker, fast car, and fast hands. He was the boy your father kept a loaded shotgun by the door for and met on the front porch if he ever thought about venturing onto his property ... let alone the threshold. He was the tall, dark, mysteriously handsome, and uncharacter-istically quiet one that made you wonder what was going on in his head, and that little voice in your head said it wasn't always so honorable. He was the boy you broke all of the rules over because bad-boys equaled excitement and the rebel in you liked the ride. ~ A.J. Lape

Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can. ~ M. John Harrison

It's the opening line of a football game returned for a touchdown. Or fumbled.

It's what orange juice is to breakfast, the first minutes of a blind date, a salesman's opening remarks.

It sets the tone, lights the stage, greases the skids for everything to follow.

It's the most important part of everything you'll ever write because if it doesn't work, whatever follows won't matter. It won't get read.

It's your opening paragraph. And enough can't be said about its importance.

Seduction. That's basically what leads are all about--enticing the reader across the threshold of your book, novel or article--because nothing happens until you get 'em inside.

And you literally have only seconds to do it because surveys show that eight out of ten people quit reading whatever it is they've started after the first fifty words. ~ Lionel Fisher

How is it to be explained that something inside me revolts against the playing of obvious moves? Perhaps we may perceive the underlying reason in the fact that I derive satisfaction from seeking to reveal the concealed meaning of a position by means of maneuvering play and therefore I do not wish to see this satisfaction curtailed by a banal, more or less fortuitous decision. Naturally, this phenomenon is played out beneath the threshold of consciousness. The waking consciousness will, of course, in each individual case, give preference to the more rapid means of deciding the game. ~ Aron Nimzowitsch

But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found? ~ Martin Buber

Shadow with a bushy tail crossed the threshold and whined: Good luck go with you, O Chief of the Wolves. And good luck and strong white teeth go with noble children that they may never forget the hungry in ~ Rudyard Kipling

Even a life of suffering has a mysterious value. Even a life on the threshold of death is a thing of splendor. Anyone who has not looked death in the face does not know this, but I know it ... ~ Milan Kundera

I was going to walk right into the hallowed halls in my battered Chucks and eans, to sit among first-edition Trollopes-assuming they'd restored them. Walk right up to whatever heavily armed security troll was at the door and demand admittance.
They wouldn't let me over the threshold. ~ Melissa Jensen

Before I had crossed the threshold of my church I was made to realize that I was shepherd of a divided flock. ~ Anna Howard Shaw

Hosts loved to detain the dry lawyer, when the light-hearted and loose-tongued had already their foot on the threshold; they liked to sit awhile in his unobtrusive company, practicing for solitude, sobering their minds in the man's rich silence after the expense and strain of gaiety. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

After she'd crossed the threshold, Tom said urgently, without thinking, "My lady?"
Slowly she reappeared, peeking at him from behind the doorjamb.
Tom wasn't sure what to say, only that he couldn't let her leave without thinking she was anything less than perfect, exactly as she was.
"You're not too plump," he said gruffly. "The more of you there is in the world, the better."
As far as compliments went, it wasn't exactly eloquent, or even appropriate. But amusement sparkled in the one blue eye that was visible before Cassandra vanished.
Every muscle in his body tensed with the instinct to follow her like a hound on the scent. ~ Lisa Kleypas

At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled. ~ Ayn Rand

Reading is at the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it. It does not constitute it ... There are certain cases of spiritual depression in which reading can become a sort of curative discipline ... reintroducing a lazy mind into the life of the Spirit. ~ Marcel Proust

If you break this door you will find me dead on the threshold."
And be easy, madame, you shall be revenged," said Bussy. ~ Alexandre Dumas

We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab and you had no warning. It was the last time you were going to have Lake Tung Ting shrimp in that kinda shady Chinese restaurant and you had no idea. If you had known, perhaps you would have stepped behind the counter and shaken everyone's hand, pulled out the disposable camera and issued posing instructions. But you had no idea. There are unheralded tipping points, a certain number of times that we will unlock the front door of an apartment. At some point you were closer to the last time than you were to the first time, and you didn't even know it. You didn't know that each time you passed the threshold you were saying goodbye. ~ Colson Whitehead

It was fear. Fear that, after all the years of protecting his health, his heart, his mind, setting bedtimes and boundaries, giving warnings about strangers and looking both ways before crossing the street, it wouldn't be enough. Fear that, as he stood on the threshold of adulthood, forces beyond their control would take him down a path where they could no longer reach him. Fear that he'd be seduced by something ugly and would choose it. And that there would be nothing they could do but let him go. ~ Lisa Unger

Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

It was strange, he said, but standing there on the sidewalk with the great grey chasms of Toronto's streets extending away to every side of him and the leash dangling from his hand, he had felt for the first time that he was at home: the feeling of having unwittingly caused an irreversible change, of his failure being the force that broke new ground, was, he realized standing there, the deepest and most familiar thing he knew. By failing he created loss, and loss was the threshold to freedom: an awkward and uncomfortable threshold, but the only one he had ever been able to cross; usually, he said, because he was shoved across it as a consequence of the events that had brought him there. ~ Rachel Cusk

Live every day as if the Son of Man were at the door, and gear your thinking to the fleeting moment. Just how can it be redeemed? Walk as if the next step would carry you across the threshold of Heaven. Pray. That saint who advances on his knees never retreats. ~ Jim Elliot

The assignment of meanings [in music] is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking. The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling. ~ Susanne K. Langer

This submission to the threshold of a cross is at the very root of our following Jesus; it changes the game completely. ~ Alan Hirsch

Careful observation will confirm that virtually all spontaneous parapsychological events occur through some form of sleight of mind. It is invariably something hovering just below the threshold of awareness that initiated an unusual event or gave one a curious half sensed feeling that something was about to happen just before it did. The magician seeks to exploid this effect deliberately, but in doing so he must avoid doing it deliberately as it were. Conscious lust of result destroys magical effect, so trickery must be employed to annul it and to activate the subconscious. ~ Peter J. Carroll

Women tread the threshold between life and death much closer than men. ~ Meg Jackson

As students cross the threshold from outside to insider, they also cross the threshold from superficial learning motivated by grades to deep learning motivated by engagement with questions. Their transformation entails an awakening
even, perhaps, a falling in love. ~ John C. Bean

However much one hears about individuals, the picture formed in the mind rarely approximates to the reality. So it was with Mrs Maclintick. I was not prepared for her in the flesh. When she opened the door to us, her formidable discontent with life swept across the threshold in scorching, blasting waves. ~ Anthony Powell

They paid the deposit immediately and appeared to be good tenants although they were reluctant to invite him over the threshold once they had moved in. "There is no need for you to come in," he had been told by a burly Russian who answered the door when he had called to see whether all was well. "There is nothing wrong. Everything functions. We are very happy. Goodbye. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

The threshold of a new house is a lonely place. ~ Margaret Atwood

Why wait for your awakening?

The moment your eyes are open, seize the day.

Would you hold back when the Beloved beckons?

Would you deliver your litany of sins like a child's collection of sea shells, prized and labeled?

"No, I can't step across the threshold," you say, eyes downcast.

"I'm not worthy, I'm afraid, and my motives aren't pure."

"I'm not perfect, and surely I haven't practiced nearly enough."

"My meditation isn't deep, and my prayers are sometimes insincere."

"I still chew my fingernails, and the refrigerator isn't clean."

Do you value your reasons for staying small more than the light shining though the open door?

Forgive yourself.

Now is the only time you have to be whole.

Now is the sole moment that exists to live in the light of your true Self.
Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain.

Please, oh please, don't continue to believe in your disbelief.

This is the day of your awakening. ~ Danna Faulds

Better not to do than to do, better to meditate than to act, better his astrophysics, the threshold of the Unkowable, than my chemistry, a mess compounded of stenches, explosions and small futile mysteries. I thought of another moral, more down to earth and concrete, and I believe that every militant chemist can confirm it: that one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost he same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened_, the practically identica, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. the difference can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad's switch points; the chemist's trade consists in good part in being aware of these differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist's trade. ~ Primo Levi

Everywhere and continually it is in your power to be reverently content with your present circumstance, to behave to men who are present with you according to right and to handle skillfully the present impression, that nothing you have not mastered may cross the threshold of the mind. ~ Marcus Aurelius

I know he's coming by this sign, That baby's almost wild; See how he laughs and crows and starts - Heaven, bless the merry child! He's father's self in face and limb, And father's heart is strong in him. Shout, baby, shout! and clap thy hands, For father on the threshold stands. ~ Mary Howitt

Suddenly there was a humming in the air, and the bees were there too. They flowed out of Granny Weatherwax's hive, circling Tiffany like a halo, crowning her, and swarm and girl stood on the threshold of the cottage and Tiffany reached out her arms and the bees settled along them, and welcomed her home. ~ Terry Pratchett

saw my sweetheart wandering about the house; he had taken a rebec and was playing a melody.
With a plectrum like fire he was playing a sweet melody, drunken and dissolute and charming from the Magian wine.
He was invoking the saqi in the air of Iraq2 ; the wine was his object, the saqi was his excuse.
The moonfaced saqi pitcher in his hand, entered from a corner and set it in the middle.
He filled the first cup with that flaming wine; did you ever see water sending out flames?
He set it on his hand for the sake of the lovers, then prostrated and kissed the threshold.
My sweetheart seized it from him and quaffed the wine; flames from that wine went running over his face.
He was beholding his own beauty, and saying to the evil eye, "Never has there been, nor shall there come in this age, another like me. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

The charity that begins at home cannot rest there but draws one inexorably over the threshold and off the porch and down the street and so out and out and out and out into the world which becomes the home wherein charity begins until it becomes possible, in theory at least, to love the whole of creation with the same patience, affection, and amusement one first practiced, in between the pouts and tantrums, with parents, siblings, spouse, and children. ~ Nancy Mairs

It soon became obvious that we were but on the threshold of the discovery. ~ Howard Carter

When we entered a classroom we always tossed our caps on the floor, to free our hands; as soon as we crossed the threshold we would throw them under the bench so hard that they struck the wall and raised a cloud of dust; this was "the way it should be done."

But the new boy either failed to notice this maneuver or was too shy to perform it himself, for he was still holding his cap on his lap at the end of the prayer. It was a head-gear of composite nature, combining elements of the busby, the lancer cap, the round hat, the otter-skin cap and the cotton nightcap--one of those wretched things whose mute ugliness has great depths of expression, like an idiot's face. Egg-shaped and stiffened by whalebone, it began with three rounded bands, followed by alternating diamond-shaped patches of velvet and rabbit fur separated by a red stripe, and finally there was a kind of bag terminating in a cardboard-lined polygon covered with complicated braid. A network of gold wire was attached to the top of this polygon by a long, extremely thin cord, forming a kind of tassel. The cap was new; its visor was shiny.

"Stand up," said the teacher.

He stood up; his cap fell. The whole class began to laugh.

He bent down and picked it up. A boy beside him knocked it down again with his elbow; he picked it up once again.

"Will you please put your helmet away?" said the teacher, a witty man. ~ Gustave Flaubert

As an athlete, when you least expect it, you may find yourself standing on the threshold of an accomplishment so monumental that it strikes fear into your soul. You must stand ready, at any moment, to face the unknown. You must be ready to walk boldly thru the wall of uncertainty. ~ John Bingham

Again the surprised expression crossed his face. He had not imagined that a woman would dare to speak so to a man. For me, I felt at home in this sort of discourse. I could never rest in communication with strong discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female, till I had passed the outworks of conventional reserve, and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won a place by their heart's very hearthstone. ~ Charlotte Bronte