Thresholds Quotes

Nevertheless, to commit burglary you must cross some imaginary border, or invisible plane, and enter another clearly defined architectural space - a volume of air, an enclosure - with the intention of committing a crime there. Without walls and thresholds - without doorways, floors, and window frames, or even roofs, awnings, and screened-in porches - burglary would not be legally possible. It is a spatial crime, one whose parameters are baked into the very elements of the built environment. ~ Geoff Manaugh

But rituals turn us all into fucking idiots. Like those birds that sleep with their heads facing backwards because their ancestors slept with their heads under their wings. Plutarch says carrying new wives across thresholds is stupid because we don't remember that it refers to the rape of the Sabine women - and that's fucking Plutarch, two thousand years ago. We still draw the Reaper with a scythe. We should draw him driving a John Deere for Archer Daniels Midland. ~ Josh Bazell

Did I learn anything? No way. But all the things you want to learn from
grief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn. There are no revelations, no wisdoms as a trade-off for the things you have lost. You
just get stupider, more selfish. Colder and grimmer. You forget your keys. You leave the house and panic that you won't remember where you live.
You know less than you ever did. You keep crossing thresholds of grief and you think, Maybe this one will unveil some sublime truth about life and
death and pain. But on the other side, there's just more grief. ~ Rob Sheffield

Gullibility and credulity are considered undesireable qualities in every department of human life - except religion ... Why are we praised by godly men for surrendering our 'godly gift' of reason when we cross their mental thresholds? ~ Christopher Hitchens

New doors have higher thresholds, prepare to leap. ~ Katy Naturalista

Let nothing offensive to the ear or the eye enter these thresholds, within which youth dwells. ~ Juvenal

Confidence comes from crossing thresholds. ~ Kamal Ravikant

Among the environmental trends undermining our future are shrinking forests, expanding deserts, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, disappearing species, and rising temperatures. The temperature increases bring crop-withering heat waves, more-destructive storms, more-intense droughts, more forest fires, and, of course, ice melting. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. ~ Lester R. Brown

USDA regulations spell out precisely what sort of facility and system is permissible, but they don't set thresholds for food-borne pathogens. (That would require the USDA to recall meat from packers who failed to meet the standards, something the USDA, incredibly, lacks the authority to do.) ~ Michael Pollan

This medical view of an ideal male who was insulated from pathogens was inextricably bound up with a parallel discourse about the maintenance of strong ego boundaries, a psychic investment in one's bodily peripheries that effected a gradual closing (and, one might say, a closing off) of the male body, at once from the outer world of dangerous stimuli and from the inner world of threatening passions. Without a doubt, as Norbert Elias has shown, in the western world both men and women experienced a shift in their sense of personal boundaries during the early modern era where, amid changing social circumstances, rising thresholds of repugnance and shame were manifested among the upper-classes as a growing aversion to their own bodily functions and to the bodies of others. The changes wrought by new developments in table manners and etiquette were extended by the introduction of hygienic practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that endeavored to maximise the order and cleanliness of the social body while futher compartmentalising the bourgeois self as a discrete bodily unit. ~ Christopher Forth

All the fakeness just rolls right off them, maybe because the nonstop sales job of American life has instilled in them exceptionally high thresholds for sham, puff, spin, bullshit, and outright lies, in other words for advertising in all its forms. ~ Ben Fountain

Quotations (3)


"If you knew you had no place in the lord's kingdom, no penance to pay…would you still choose to sin?"

- Frieda, fortune teller from the fair


"You cloud my vision and haunt my memories. I'm the light at the end of your tunnel. Let it be me."

- Noah Hogan


"Crossroads, boundaries and thresholds…do you remember?"

- Jezebel Godfrey ~ L.J. Scar

Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her - oh yes - until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home. ~ Clive Barker

EVEN RANDOMNESS IS WITHIN A SET OF PARAMETERS; THRESHOLDS ... ~ Clyde DeSouza

I walked up the stairs and hesitated at the open door. ~ Susan Hill

Magic and its remedies deal with borders, markers, distinctions, insides and outsides, the limits of bodies, and also that which breaches these boundaries; bodily fluids, exchanges of objects through bodies and across thresholds, words that pass through the guard of the ear and enter the mind of the hearer. Women's bodies by virtue of their reproductive capacities, are seen as more open, more grotesque, less autonomous ~ Diane Purkiss

In the construction of houses, choice of woods is made. Straight un-knotted timber of good appearance is used for the revealed pillars, straight timber with small defects is used for the inner pillars. Timbers of the finest appearance, even if a little weak, is used for the thresholds, lintels, doors, and sliding doors, and so on. Good strong timber, though it be gnarled and knotted, can always be used discreetly in construction. ~ Miyamoto Musashi

4. Full Circle

Today I like the traffic jam.
The engine noises heard in detail.
My whole life, a river of thresholds, stitches itself together
and gazes at me
from everywhere.
I like these places where time kinks and looks back over its shoulder
at itself. It confuses them, who are used to being blurs.
But I'm alright here with my terror. I'm in no hurry.
I get paid by the hour.
I let anybody merge in front of me.
I know there's nowhere to hide. ~ Richard Cronshey

May your body be blessed.
May you realize that your body is
a faithful and beautiful friend of your soul.
And may you be peaceful and joyful and
recognize that your senses are sacred thresholds.
May you realize that holiness is mindful gazing,
feeling, hearing and touching.
May your senses gather you and bring you home.
May your senses always enable you to celebrate
the universe and the mystery and possibilities
in you presence here.
May the Eros of the Earth bless you. ~ John O'Donohue

It is difficult to describe what happened next-except to say that it is a moment that occurs uniquely in the history of refugees. Q tiny bolt of understanding passed between them. The woman recognized my father- not the actual man, whom she had never met, but the form of the man : a boy returning home. In Calcutta- in Berlin, Peshawar, Delhi, Dhaka- men like this seem to turn up everyday, appearing out of nowhere off the streets and walking unannounced into houses, stepping casually over thresholds into their past. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Sometimes ... I wander about in this house that Nathan and I renewed, that is now aged and worn by our life in it. How many steps, wearing the thresholds? I look at it all again. Sometimes it fills to the brim with sorrow, which signifies the joy that has been here, and the love. It is entirely a gift. (158) ~ Wendell Berry

At that moment he didn't like mankind, the grown-ups, the adults. He never liked them when it was dark. At such times it was his habit to think mankind away. Then the world would seem like a dark, empty house, and he felt a shudder inside himself, as if now he had to search through room after room - dark rooms where you didn't know what was hidden in the corners - feeling his way across the thresholds where no foot would tread any more apart from his, until in one room the doors in front of and behind him would suddenly close and he would be facing the mistress of the black hordes herself. And at that moment all the locks of all the other doors he had come through would shut, and far beyond the walls the shadows of the darkness would stand watch, like black eunuchs, keeping out all human contact. ~ Robert Musil

Our neon times have neglected and evaded the depth-kingdoms of interiority in favour of the ghost realms of cyberspace. Our world becomes reduced to intense but transient foreground. We have unlearned the patience and attention of lingering at the thresholds where the unknown awaits us. We have become haunted pilgrims addicted to distraction and driven by the speed and colour of images. I ~ John O'Donohue

You're such a natural at this, Bella; I forget how very strange this all must be for you. I wish I could hear it." He ducked down and yanked me up into his arms so fast that I didn't see it coming- which was really something.
"Hey!"
"Thresholds are part of my job description," he reminded me. ~ Stephenie Meyer

Life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and to rest, and then to begin acting again, but in a different way. And there are always new thresholds to cross: the threshold of summer and winter, of season or a year, of a month of a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity and old age; the threshold of death and that of the afterlife -- for those who believe in it. ~ Arnold Van Gennep

It was understood that they shared the same thresholds
the same inexhaustible appetite for wasting time, for discussing lofty ideas, for dissecting trivial things, for driving to nowhere in particular, for listening to music, for talking about books, for obsessing over pop culture, but mostly for laughing, talking, and simply being together. There was nothing one could say that the other would find too cruel or too kind. And on those rare occasions when they did tire of each other, they needed only go a day without talking before they yearned to reconnect. ~ Galt Niederhoffer

Thresholds of pain, indignity and incapacity are entirely personal. ~ Polly Toynbee

We are custodians of deep and ancient thresholds. In the human face you see that potential and the miracle of undying possibility. ~ John O'Donohue

Do you know that there's a halfway world between each ending and each new beginning? It's called the hurting time, Jean Perdu. It's a bog; it's where your dreams and worries and forgotten plans gather. Your steps are heavier during that time. Don't underestimate the transition, Jeanno, between farewell and new departure. Give yourself the time you need. Some thresholds are too wide to be taken in one stride. ~ Nina George

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

Thresholds don't exist in terms of our bodies. Our speed and strength depend on our body, but the real thresholds, those that make us give up or continue the struggle, those that enable us to fulfill our dreams, depend not on our bodies but on our minds and the hunger we feel to turn dreams into reality. ~ Kilian Jornet

When men do not love their hearth, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have dishonoured both ... Our God is a house-hold God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's dwelling. ~ John Ruskin

The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to protect, contain, support and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling - that is the supreme psychic nourishment. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight. It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit. The body is the launcher of those experiences. Without body there would be no sensations of crossing thresholds, there would be no sense of lifting, no sense of height, weightlessness. All that comes from the body. The body is the rocket launcher. In its nose capsule, the soul looks out the window into the mysterious starry night and is dazzled. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Merleau-Ponty's painting inhabits the same rhetoric as early cinema: it makes the invisible visible, or rather it makes visibility visible; it forms from the thresholds of the visible and invisible world, an order, mode, or aesthetic of visuality. Not only of the small or fast, but of visibility as such. The visuality of the visible and the invisible is found in the mixture of the body and its world, of your body and your world, all your worlds, all your bodies in this world and all those others. Painting is the process by which the visuality of the visible and invisible is made manifest: "Painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings." Each painting is a universal archive, a picture of the universe, a universal image - and like a dream. ~ Akira Mizuta Lippit

When you look at the money spent by labor unions for Democrats, it comes as no surprise the Democrats crafted a campaign-finance 'disclosure' bill with the thresholds adjusted to exempt unions. ~ Mark McKinnon

Adolescence is never graceful or beautiful. Our first steps are wobbly, full of stumbles and spills. Our first words are mispronounced and barely comprehendible. Our first kisses are sloppy and wet. The process of breaking sexual thresholds is far from sexy. It will be a long time until being a penetrator outgrows the feel of a grade school science experiment where I fill my paper mache volcano with vinegar and baking soda, giggling and high-fiving my lab partner once it explodes. ~ Maggie Young

Do not contemplate the Essence of the UnVeiled, for the UnVeiled therein your World does not hold to polarities, nor of your conjectures; Chapter The Unveiling ~ AainaA-Ridtz