Borderland 2 Quotes & Sayings

(W.D.) Howells asserted that the Americans' 'love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry.' Their fiction, he added, often gathers in the gray 'twilight of the reason,' on 'the borderland between experience and illusion. Howells's geographical metaphor was derived, of course, from Hawthorne's idea of a moonlit 'neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.' Whether literally, as in Cooper's The Spy, or metaphorically, as in Hawthorne's works, the neutral territory/borderland was the familiar setting of the American romance. As American writers came to realize, not only was there a borderland between East and West, civilization and wilderness, but also between the here and the hereafter, between conscious and unconscious, 'experience and illusion' - psychic frontiers on the edge of territories both enticing and terrifying. — Howard Kerr

There've always been people in the borderland between childhood and adulthood. That state is not a matter of chronological age. It's a matter of understanding that you can accept a future that has been defined by the previous generation, or you can reject it and make something new. — Will Shetterly

I've often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order of importance; I usually use it to approach the large issue of perception, so that my fantastical elements, while intended as real within the stories, occupy some borderland between reality and psychology. — Karen Joy Fowler

It seems to Werner that the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other. He thinks of the girl who may or may not be in the city behind him. — Anthony Doerr

In 1966 Rolf Edberg wrote "This is mankind's home", "in the narrow borderland between the deathly heat beneath our feet and the coldness of space above us". He describes the fragility of our existence in poetic terms: "the atmospheric layer is so thin that it cannot be represented on any globe with even the finest brushstroke. At its thickest, it is only a few fractions of a millionth of the Earth's radius. This thin layer is what makes the difference between our planet and the sterile landscape of the moon." After reading that, one does feel the need to take better care of this fragile layer. — Margot Wallstrom

Between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other. — Anthony Doerr

Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Outside our consciousness there lies the cold and alien world of actual things. Between the two stretches the narrow borderland of the senses. No communication between the two worlds is possible excepting across the narrow strip. For a proper understanding of ourselves and of the world, it is of the highest importance that this borderland should be thoroughly explored. — Heinrich Hertz

When he possessed her, they seemed to swoon together at the very borderland of life's mystery. — Kate Chopin

It's as well to be prepared." "No - it's as well not to be prepared." "Why?" "Because - " Her thought drew being from the obscure borderland. She could not explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy. It — E. M. Forster

This missing science of heredity, this unworked mine of knowledge on the borderland of biology and anthropology, which for all practical purposes is as unworked now as it was in the days of Plato, is, in simple truth, ten times more important to humanity than all the chemistry and physics, all the technical and indsutrial science that ever has been or ever will be discovered. — George Herbert

Advent is a season that is a borderland. A new year is coming. We're waiting for the coming of Jesus, both for his birth on Christmas Day and for his coming again on the Last Day. — Heidi Haverkamp

Supernatural fiction contains its own generic borderland: a neutral territory, which Tzvetan Todorov calls 'the fantastic,' between 'the marvelous' and 'the uncanny.' According to Todorov, 'The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.' Once the event is satisfactorily explained (and sometimes it is never explained), we have left the fantastic for an adjacent genre - either 'the uncanny,' where the apparently supernatural is revealed as illusory, or 'the marvelous,' where the laws of ordinary reality must be revised to incorporate the supernatural. As long as uncertainty reigns, however, we are in the ambiguous realm of the fantastic. — Howard Kerr

who can look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there may well be wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly unreasonable?" "No," said the other priest; "reason is always reasonable, even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of things. I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason." The other priest raised his austere face to the spangled sky and said: "Yet who knows if in that infinite universe - ?" "Only infinite physically," said the little priest, turning sharply in his seat, "not infinite in the sense of escaping from the laws of truth." Valentin — G.K. Chesterton

But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination
with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighted in leading readers into, but not out of, the haunted dusk of the borderland. — Howard Kerr

Reason is always reasonable, even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of all things. I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is really the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God Himself is bound by reason. — G.K. Chesterton

The greatest mathematics has the simplicity and inevitableness of supreme poetry and music, standing on the borderland of all that is wonderful in Science, and all that is beautiful in Art. — Robert Turnbull

The fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath the comforting rational surface. The fantastic is, moreover, a product of human imagination, perhaps even an excess of imagination. It arises when laws thought to be absolute are transcended, in the borderland between life and death, the animate and the inanimate, the self and the world; it arises when the real turns into the unreal, and the solid presence into vision, dream or hallucination. The fantastic is the unexpected occurrence, the startling novelty which goes contrary to all our expectations of what is possible. The ego multiplies and splits, time and space are distorted. — Franz Rottensteiner

Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness ... It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful. — Kenneth E. Boulding

Dreams and death were old friends of his. He knew how to navigate their dark borderland. — Rick Riordan

The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a border culture.
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

The boundary between the real and the unreal had been let down in Foote's mind, and between the comings and goings of the cloud-shadows and the dark errands of the ghosts there was no longer any way of making a selection. He had entered the cobwebby borderland between the human and the animal, where nothing is ever more than half true, and only as much as half true for the moment.

("There Shall Be No Darkness") — James Blish

I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant's brilliant non-fiction about humankind's tragically ambivalent relationship with the natural world. Now he brings his abundant literary gifts to a debut novel set in a very real borderland in which human beings are themselves treated like animals. The Jaguar's Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it. — John Burnham Schwartz

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