Threshold Quotes (page 3)
She had somehow given over the thinking to him, and in his absences her every action seemed automatically governed by what he would like, so that now she felt inadequate to match her intentions against his. Yet think she must; she knew at last the number on the dreadful door of fantasy, the threshold to the escape that was no escape; she knew that for her greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think—or else...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I walked up the ramp and stood in the van, trying to decide where to begin my inspection of the concealed words whose bones were molded together by men to make either an awesome vision of truth that would guard any door of the mind, or a creature that would stand for a while, deceptively whole, then collapse, scattering across the threshold the dry dead bones that did not even burst into flame at their friction one with the other.
Janet Frame
Is this what is called remorse of conscience or repentance? I do not know, and I cannot tell to this day. Perhaps this remembrance even now contains something pleasurable for my passions. No--what is unbearable to me is only this image alone, and precisely on the threshold, with its raised and threatening little fist, only that look alone, only that minute alone, only that shaking head. This is what I cannot bear, because since then it appears to me almost every day. It does not appear...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
I have wanted you for so long now,” he said roughly, “I’ve no memory of how it feels to be devoid of the craving. But you must know what you do. I need you to think of who you are and where you are and who I am. Think of how things will be once we’ve crossed this threshold. Think of how you will leave this cabin—disheveled and well fucked.
Sylvia Day
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge. The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness. If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
Khalil Gibran
We feel very strongly that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off and we could like him to provide us with desires... That is the value of reading and is also its inadequacy. To make it into discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
Marcel Proust
At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually...and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Of all the spirits I have seen, only Elvis and Mr. Sinatra are able to manifest in the garments of their choice. Others haunt me always in whatever they were wearing when they died. This is one reason I will never attend a costume party dressed as the traditional symbol of the New Year, in nothing buy a diaper and a top hat. Welcomed into either Hell or Heaven, I do not want to cross the threshold to the sound of demonic or angelic laughter. ~Odd Thomas
Dean Koontz
More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world--a place where we've always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward. . . . . Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts. And so the...
Barack Obama