Threshold Quotes

“John O’Donohue gave voice to the connection between beauty and those edges of life—thresholds was the word he loved—where the fullness of reality becomes more stark and more clear. If you go back to the etymology of the word “threshold,” it comes from “threshing,” which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness. There are huge thresholds in every life. You know that, for instance, if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, fifty things to do and you get a phone call that somebody you love is suddenly dying, it takes ten seconds to communicate that information. But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. Suddenly everything that seems so important before is all gone and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we think is there and the solid ground we are on is so tentative. And a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and very often how we cross is the key thing.”

“Poetry is more a threshold than a path.”

“This was the threshold to the place of the dead.”

“But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.”

“Confidence comes from crossing thresholds.”

“Once you cross the threshold, you will never be the same. That is a fact.”

“I have a high pain threshold. In fact, it's more of a large and tastfully decorated foyer than a threshold. But I do get easily bored”

“At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better.”

“There's a threshold of pain, a person loses consciousness in order not to die. And there's a threshold of grief, it suddenly stops hurting. And you feel nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Just as a balloon filled gradually with air bursts when the limit of its tensile strength is passed, there are thresholds of radical, disruptive change in politics. When those thresholds are crossed, the impossible suddenly becomes probable, with revolutionary implications for governments and nations.”