Beyond Border Quotes & Sayings

She needed Andrew Simpson Smith, it was that simple. And he had spent his life training to help people like her. Gods.
"Okay, Andrew. But let's leave today. I'm in a hurry."
"Of course. Today." He stroked the place where his slight beard was beginning to grow. "These ruins where your friends are waiting? Where are they?"
Tally glances up at the sun, still low enough to indicate the eastern horizon. After a moment's calculation, she pointed off to the northwest, back toward the city and beyond that, the Rusty Ruins. "About a week's walk that way."
"A week?"
"That means seven days."
"Yes, I know the gods' calendar," he said huffily. "But a whole week?"
"Yeah. That's not so far, is it?" The hunters had been tireless on their march the night before.
He shook his head, an awed expression on his face. "But that is beyond the edge of the world. — Scott Westerfeld

Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self? — Milan Kundera

One could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one's mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one's image in the mirror. — Amitav Ghosh

And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marshes of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug in to unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future. — Hilary Mantel

And yet, over the years I've met so many people like Jared who seem to be more at home, happier, living in a country on of their birth ... Not political refugees, escaping a repressing regime, nor economic refugees, crossing a border in search of a better-paying job. The are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually hedonic refugees have an ephiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, that they were born in the wrong country. — Eric Weiner

The poets are a harmless little folk, with their dreams and raptures and heaven full of Greek gods that they carry about with them in their fantasy. But they become wicked as soon as they presume to hold their ideal up to reality and then flail the latter angrily, when they should have nothing at all to do with it. They would, nevertheless, remain harmless if they were only granted their free little place in reality un disturbed and not compelled through crowding and pressure to cast a backward glance at it, for it reaches beyond the clouds, and they themselves cannot survey it all and must cling to the stars as provisory border points, of which, however, who knows how many are yet today invisible, their light still in the process of journeying down to us. — Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann

Government by idea tends to take in everything, to make the whole of society obedient to the idea. Spaces not so governed are unconquered, beyond the border, unconverted, a future danger. — Lord Acton

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life
and herein lies its secret
takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch. — Milan Kundera

You will never meet anyone who admires the American founders more than I do, but they were human, they made mistakes. Perhaps their worst was that their Bill of Rights stops at the border. Inside the US, the federal government has been limited. Beyond the borders, the government has been able to do anything it wanted. — Richard J. Maybury

Whatever is placed beyond the reach of sense and knowledge, whatever is imperfectly discerned, the fancy pieces out at its leisure; and all but the present moment, but the present spot, passion claims for its own, and brooding over it with wings outspread, stamps it with an image of itself. Passion is lord of infinite space, and distant objects please because they border on its confines and are moulded by its touch. — William Hazlitt

The shelves were packed close together, and it felt like I was standing at the border of a forest
not a friendly Californian forest, either, but an old Transylvanian forest, a forest full of wolves and witches and dagger-wielding bandits all waiting just beyond moonlight's reach. — Robin Sloan

For a long time I believed the opposite of passion was death. I was wrong. Passion and death are implicit, one in the other. Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame. — Marya Hornbacher

Corus lay on the southern bank of the Oloron River, towers glinting in the sun. The homes of wealthy men lined the river to the north; tanners, smiths, wainwrights, carpenters, and the poor clustered on the bank to the south. The city was a richly colored tapestry: the Great Gate on Kings-bridge, the maze of the Lower City, the marketplace, the tall houses in the Merchants' and the Gentry's quarters, the gardens of the Temple district, the palace. This last was the city's crown and southern border. Beyond it, the royal forest stretched for leagues. It was not as lovely as Berat nor as colorful as Udayapur, but it was Alanna's place. — Tamora Pierce

How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy tales appropriated by a mind hungry for a story. The fantasies of an imaginative little girl anxious to explain to herself the inexplicable. Whatever story I may have discovered on the frontier of forgetting, I do not pretend to myself that is the truth. — Diane Setterfield

The causal dimensions, the planes of light, are happiness. They are all different and are all endless. They border the shores of nirvana, which is beyond discussion - a condition of perfection that cannot be expressed. — Frederick Lenz

That same moment he ordered the hateful portrait taken out. But that did not calm his inner agitation: all his feelings and all his being were shaken to their depths, and he came to know that terrible torment which, by way of a striking exception, sometimes occurs in nature, when a weak talent strains to show itself on too grand a scale and fails; that torment which gives birth to great things in a youth, but, in passing beyond the border of dream, turns into a fruitless yearning; that dreadful torment which makes a man capable of terrible evildoing. — Nikolai Gogol

I am in between. Trying to write to be understood by those who matter to me, yet also trying to push my mind with ideas beyond the everyday. It is another borderland I inhabit. Not quite here nor there. On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone. — Sergio Troncoso

I felt in that moment as if it were all a dream - the training, my former life, the world I had left behind. None of that mattered anymore. Only this place mattered, only this moment, and not because the psychologist had hypnotized me. In the grip of that powerful emotion, I stared out toward the coast, through the jagged narrow spaces between the trees. There, a greater darkness gathered, the confluence of the night, the clouds, and the sea. Somewhere beyond, another border. — Jeff VanderMeer

To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile, — Octavio Paz

Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star. For most people, the real world ends on the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village, or, at the very most, on the border of their valley. That, which is beyond is unreal, unimportant, and even useless, whereas that which we have at our fingertips, in our field of vision, expands until it seems an entire universe, overshadowing all else. Often, the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens. The newcomer has a wide-angle lens, which gives him a distant diminished view, although with a long horizon line, while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

He has always had a dread of crossing borders, he doesn't like to leave what's known and safe for the blank space beyond in which anything can happen. Everything at times of transition takes on a symbolic weight and power. But this too is why he travels. The world you're moving through flows into another one inside, nothing stays divided any more, this stands for that, weather for mood, landscape for feeling, for every object there is a corresponding inner gesture, everything turns into metaphor. The border line on a map, but also drawn inside himself somewhere. — Damon Galgut

ANYWHERE COULD BE SOMEWHERE I might have come from the high country, or maybe the low country, I don't recall which. I might have come from the city, but what city in what country is beyond me. I might have come from the outskirts of a city from which others have come or maybe a city from which only I have come. Who's to know? Who's to decide if it rained or the sun was out? Who's to remember? They say things are happening at the border, but nobody knows which border. They talk of a hotel there, where it doesn't matter if you forgot your suitcase, another will be waiting, big enough, and just for you. — Mark Strand

Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge. — Rebecca Solnit

You can only exceed your limits if you've discovered them. — Roel Van Sleeuwen

Maybe there is something. Something deep. Something in border of physical and incomprehensible. Something unknowable.
Something completely beyond of all psychological, logical and scientific definitions about human. Something, for which the death is no irreversible limit.Something so strange and absurd.
Something infinite and eternal in Homo Sapiens. Never - dying fire.
The human spirit. — Alexandar Tomov

In the fall of 1932, Bergelson undertook the longest journey of his life. He traveled the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way through Siberia and beyond, disembarking just fifty miles shy of the border with China, in the budding Jewish autonomy of Birobidzhan. The Jews of Birobidzhan welcomed him grandly, as if he were a long-lost descendant of a royal Yiddish tribe. A plenary session of the settlement council convened in his honor. He toured the new collective farms in the company of local authorities. He participated, as a guest of honor, in the celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution - an unprecedented role for a foreign national. — Masha Gessen