permeable QUOTES

1 " We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this—through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication—we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. One of the most difficult problems is to construct these barriers of such a height and strength that one has a true harbor, a sanctuary away from crippling turmoil and pain, but yet low enough, and permeable enough, to let in fresh seawater that will fend off the inevitable inclination toward brackishness. "

― Kay Redfield Jamison , An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

2 " I don’t know whether Asimov realized he was saying this as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever look at you, read a word you write, or consider you in any situation, no matter whether the roof is falling in or the money is pouring in, without saying to him- or herself (whether in an attempt to count it or to discount it), 'Negro...' The racial situation, permeable as it might sometimes seem (and it is, yes, highly permeable), is nevertheless your total surround. Don’t you ever forget it...! And I never have. "

― Samuel R. Delany

3 " Fear grid-irons your broken, suffering heart with strength, encasing it with a protective, tough shell. One that soon becomes a prison that will emaciate the unused, enclosed heart inside if left to its own accord. But renewed hope gently unwraps the hard cast, and replaces it with a more resilient, pliable layer, protective, strong, but permeable so as to let love soak in and nurture the malnourished, dying heart inside. "

― Connie Kerbs , Paths of Fear: An Anthology of Overcoming Through Courage, Inspiration, and the Miracle of Love (Pebbled Lane Books Book 1)

4 " Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one's boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. "

― Mohsin Hamid , The Reluctant Fundamentalist

5 " Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that they're more " open to new experiences" than the rest of us. Temptingly, psychologist Alexander Guiora proposed that we have a self that's bound up in our native language, a " language ego" , which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language. Those with more fluid ego boundaries, like children and people who have drunk some alcohol, are more willing to sound not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language. "

6 " What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door. "

― Hilary Mantel , Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2)

7 " The Wishing Bones

A thousand grandmothers ago
Pyrrha and Deucalion repopulated
the world with rocks, bones of mother Earth,
a generation of my ancestors strained
from the mud of a drowned planet.

But I’m more interested in my earliest
grandmothers, their gills and wetness,
before they crawled from that blue expanse
and learned to carry the sea within them,
in their cells, between their cells, in their eyes.

The buoyancy of ocean has never left us.
It hides in skin’s complex reservoir
where we're selectively permeable
and our bodies exchange the smallest life.

If we had no need to distinguish ourselves
from others we’d be missing the skin
that defines lovers and enemies
and opens itself to both. "

― Jalina Mhyana , Spikeseed

8 " A Permeable Life is about what presses out from the heart, what comes in at a slant and what shimmers below the surface of things. To live permeably is to be open-hearted and audacious, to risk showing up as our truest self, and embracing a willingness to be astonished. "

― Carrie Newcomer , A Permeable Life: Poems & Essays

9 " The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces. "

― Philip G. Zimbardo