Liminality Quotes

A fiance is neither this nor that: he's left one shore, but not yet reached the other.

It's a liminal thing, humming, And I'm always interested in liminal things.

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge.

...precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born.

Twilight - a time of pause when nature changes her guard. All living things would fade and die from too much light or too much dark, if twilight were not.

We are an episode between two oblivions.

I always had this crisis: where do I come from? I was never an insider, never an outsider; I was always in the middle. But it means I never have borders in my head.

I think I fall into a lot of cracks in terms of I'm too something. I'm too this, I'm too that. And my music has never really had a home. I've been this floating alternative. I'm too mainstream for alternative. I'm too alternative for mainstream. And I'm just kind of wandering.

There are no guarantees. But there is also nothing to fear. We come from oblivion when we are born. We return to oblivion when we die. The astonishing thing is this period of in-between.

I have a theory of living on the boundary: on the boundary of patriarchy and the boundary of different dimensions.

People always say 'Etta, you know what your problem is? You're neither fish nor fowl. There is no place to rack you.' When I would go in a record shop, you might find one or two records by me in different stacks.

I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel - till I am - nothing. As it happens, I like it that way.

To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.

There is no such thing as life in-between.

Perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either.

live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

I feel like 'Harlem River' was me putting one foot out the door of New York, and 'Still Life' is between Point A and Point B. It's the grey area.

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

The experience of being in between-between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bars and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, or extraordinary aliveness.

Where do I really belong? I avoid saying everywhere - which switches all too easily to nowhere. Instead, when pressed, I call myself a fractalist.

I'm a dweller of the threshold and I'm waiting at the door, and I'm standing in the darkness, I don't want to wait no more.

Janie blinks and leans against the wall, just in case. But it's no one's dream. It's just the end of some things. And the beginning of others.