Permeable Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The Wishing BonesA 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 expanseand 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.”