Permeable Quotes & Sayings

Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can't show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn't matter whose body is whose. — Diane Ackerman

It's a matter of whether you see the self as fundamentally in relationship to other selves or not - whether you see the boundary between self and the world as relatively permeable, which makes you "interdependent" (collectivist) in outlook, or relatively impermeable, which makes you "independent" (individualistic). — Gish Jen

Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable. — Jane Hirshfield

As the border between physical and digital gets more permeable, a new kind of literacy emerges. And that literacy is built on a foundation of code - whether it's the codes of letters and words, or the code of bits and algorithms. — John Battelle

I find there's a thin, permeable membrane between journalism and history, and though some academic historians take a dim view of it, I gather a lot of strength and professional inspiration from passing back and forth across it. — Hampton Sides

In order to understand the conditions we are in, we must place ourselves not in the mainstream of life but in the timeless stream of myth. As the fabric of life loosens, the veil between this world of hard facts and the otherworld of great imagination also becomes thinner and more permeable. Just as time seems to be running out, timeless things try to slip back into human awareness. — Michael Meade

Shift from modern nuclear family to the postmodern permeable family. — David Elkind

Sometimes I became so permeable, so porous, that I would absorb too much, until a valve yielded, and everything rushed out in a quick drain. — Ellen Miller

Nature is flexible and resilient. Nature likes redundancy and dispersion. It is approximate and deals in gradients. All boundaries are permeable. Nature nests small systems like molecules within larger systems like cells, which in turn are nested in systems called organs, organisms, ecosystems. We grew from ancient one-celled ancestors. Nature likes mergers: we contain multitudes of other life forms within us. We stand at the crest of four billion years, bacteria molded into wondrous form, burning with a slow fire and about to take the next step. — Robert Frenay

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

He spoke about how we are permeable fluid beings instead of stable unitary isolates; about recursive reconstruction of the self; about an engagement with the world that constantly creates a new you, only you don't know it, because you're not the person you would have been otherwise - you're a one-person experiment that has lost its control. — Anonymous

I'll tell you the only way to survive: Ask God to place a semi-permeable shield around your heart: One that only allows what He loves to enter. — Yasmin Mogahed

Authors we are in danger of accepting as gospel, whereas founders of discursivity provide permeable ideas that we can elaborate upon in a tradition of constructive dialogue. — Paul Fry

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 line between actual killing and verbal, symbolic, or imaginary violence is thin and permeable. The threat of violence is a method of forceful coercion, even if no blood is actually shed. — John J. Collins

I also believe that the boundaries of school need to be made more porous and permeable, that we need to reduce the generational segregation that defines life and learning in our society. — Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events. — Teresa De Lauretis

The good news is that if you don't seal up your heart with caulking compound, and instead stay permeable, people stay alive inside you, and maybe outside you, too, forever. This — Anne Lamott

THE MISCONCEPTION: Memories are played back like recordings. THE TRUTH: Memories are constructed anew each time from whatever information is currently available, which makes them highly permeable to influences from the present. — David McRaney

In some way, people believe that if you are permeable, if you are a good listener, you don't have the quality of somebody with a firm attitude. This is what, fundamentally, I got from my mother. — Renzo Piano

Giving voice to marginalised characters is extremely important to me. I want to explore the pain of disenfranchisement, the social strata and boundaries we create and how to make them more permeable. — Sue Monk Kidd

...kids marked by the special thinness that one has only once, the transparent thinness of early maturity, when, without knowing it, you are immortal. And completely permeable. When you can walk indifferently down the street with a lover because you have become that lover. Two small people without dislike of suspicion. — Andrea Lee

As I've gotten older, I've realized that things are a lot more permeable. It's not so black and white: not every journalist is a jerk. — Kathleen Hanna

It is not a problem of the market form but of markets deformed - deformed by the long shadow of historical injustices and the ongoing, continuous exercise of legal privilege on behalf of capital. The market anarchist tradition is radically pro-market and anticapitalist - reflecting its consistent concern with the deeply political character of corporate power, the dependence of economic elites on the tolerance or active support of the state, the permeable barriers between political and economic elites, and the cultural embeddedness of hierarchies established and maintained by state-perpetrated and state-sanctioned violence. — Gary Chartier

I think I'm very permeable. I can very easily, without even choosing to do it, enter the life of another. Or, to put it in a more modest and accurate way, for that life to enter mine. — John Berger

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

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

But I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog's money, my dog's time - everything. — Elizabeth Gilbert

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

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable. — Kevin Powers

The boundaries between you and not-you - what lies beyond your skin - relax and become more permeable. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others - really see them, wholeheartedly - springs open. — Barbara Fredrickson

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. — Michael Erard

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

I don't want my world to be subset A such that it doesn't intersect with any others (B, C or D), a watertight shape drawn on a slate, whole but empty. I'd rather be elsewhere, following a line that leads to places where worlds communicate with each other, overlap, where the edges are permeable, where life follows a path without breaks, where things don't come to an end brutally for no reason, where important events come with instructions (level of risk, mains or batteries, expected duration) and the necessary equipment (airbags, GPS, ABS). — Delphine De Vigan

The biggest organ in your body is your skin, and it's a permeable membrane. Anything you put on it goes into you. If you can't pronounce most of the words on the back of the bottle, it's probably not good for you. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.

The line between good and evil is movable and it's permeable. — Philip Zimbardo