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1 " John O’Donohue gave voice to the connection between beauty and those edges of life—thresholds was the word he loved—where the fullness of reality becomes more stark and more clear. If you go back to the etymology of the word “threshold,” it comes from “threshing,” which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness. There are huge thresholds in every life. You know that, for instance, if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, fifty things to do and you get a phone call that somebody you love is suddenly dying, it takes ten seconds to communicate that information. But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. Suddenly everything that seems so important before is all gone and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we think is there and the solid ground we are on is so tentative. And a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and very often how we cross is the key thing. "
2 " 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 Georgiana Young
3 " 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. "
4 " 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
5 " Just as a balloon filled gradually with air bursts when the limit of its tensile strength is passed, there are thresholds of radical, disruptive change in politics. When those thresholds are crossed, the impossible suddenly becomes probable, with revolutionary implications for governments and nations. "
