a border QUOTES

1 " A passport, as I'm sure you know, is a document that one shows to government officials whenever one reaches a border between two countries, so that the official can learn who you are, where you were born, and how you look when photographed unflatteringly. "

― Lemony Snicket

2 " The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. "

― Milan Kundera

3 " Most of the institutions that come in to offer help after disaster don't have the resources to provide concrete help. . . . Donor communities invest billions funding peace talks and disarmament. Then they stop. The most important part of postwar help is missing: providing basic social services to people. Not having those resources might have been a reason men went to war in the first place; they crossed a border and joined an armed group because they didn't have jobs. In Liberia right now, there are hundreds of thousands of unemployed young people, and they're ready-made mercenaries for wars in West Africa. You'd think the international community would be sensible enough to know they should work to change this. But they aren't. "

― , Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War

4 " Gómez had suggested I steal a fish to achieve more courage and purpose. I regarded this task as an anthropological experiment, though it crossed a border into something approaching magic, or perhaps magical thinking. When I googled how to gut a fish, there were over 9 million results. "

― Deborah Levy , Hot Milk

5 " He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. And he was a scholar.... You can still live on that shimmering line between your old thinking and your new understanding, always in a state of learning. In the figurative sense, this is a border that is always moving-- as you advance forward in your studies and realizations, that mysterious forest of the unknown always stays a few feet ahead of you, so you have to travel light in order to keep following it. You have to stay mobile, movable, supple. "

― Elizabeth Gilbert , Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

6 " Using money in one’s attempt to put an end to poverty is like using a border in one’s attempt to put an end to xenophobia. "

― Mokokoma Mokhonoana , N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups

7 " Like other discriminatory legislation in our country's history, immigration laws define and differentiate legal status on the basis of arbitrary attributes. Immigration laws create unequal rights. People who break immigration laws don't cause harm or even potential harm (unlike, for example, drunk driving, which creates the potential for harm even if no accident occurs). Rather, people who break immigration laws do things that are perfectly legal for others, but denied to them--like crossing a border or, even more commonly, simply exist. "

― Aviva Chomsky , They Take Our Jobs!: And 20 Other Myths about Immigration

8 " There were the Newport hills, far up the bay, marked now by a rim of lights. There was the water, a blue shimmer under the sun, a black mirror after dark, somehow alive, a living thing that tied it all together, the houses hugging the rim and the people in them, drawn there to be beside the bay. The water had been there in the beginning, the beautiful bay all alone; and now the houses had crowded about it, hemming it in a row of stucco and brick and white clapboard. Someday the bay would be alone again. When The Thing went off. When all of the houses would be blown away. There would be floating rubble, a border of broken trash for a little while. "

― Dolores Hitchens , The Watcher

9 " This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone. "

― Robert M. Pirsig , Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1)

10 " Verlange. The process feels like crossing a border on a one-way ticket, from a state of innocence, to one of irreconcilable knowledge. You are in a new country. But no one wants to live here. The visas are assigned by some obscure system nobody can comprehend. "

― , The Fifth Mrs Brink: A Memoir

11 " Building a museum case and filling it with types of mussels is one way of knowing mussels; but on the shore, a mussel leads to a crab or a curious stone, which leads to another thing and eventually leads back to mussels, which is another and perhaps a more far-reaching way to know mussels. The sea that always seems like a metaphor, but one that is always moving, cannot be fixed, like a heart that is a like a tongue that is like a mystery that is like a story that is like a border that is like something altogether different and like everything at once. One thing leads to another, and this is the treasure that always runs through your fingers and never runs out. "

― Rebecca Solnit , Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

12 " We will have a border that is open for business, open for tourism, open for legitimate travelers; but that is closed to terrorists and drug pushers and smugglers and others who seek to break the law. "

13 " Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization. "