Quotes About Boundaries

They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy

These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors. She kept an honor code with her journals and her poems. 'Inside, inside,' she would whisper quietly to herself when she felt the urge to tell...

I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.

I knew my mother's limitations because they formed the marrow of my bones.

To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades. Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks and roads, and these were the paths that, if you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.

They were all things she would not give away in New York, where she watched others tell their drunken bar stories, prostituting their families and their trauma for popularity and booze. These things, she felt, were not to be passed around like disingenuous party favors.

Too much respect for people who are not respectful to you is a sure sign of insecurity.

Some people think politeness is an invitation to invade.

She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that no is a word the world never learned to say to her.

Choose someone to love who wouldn't even hear of it.

The experience I had last night is the only kind she's interested in. [...] being with the people of the world in a certain way, he elaborated, noting her look. A way that erases all boundaries and bullshit.

Adaptation is care work. Adaptation is survival. Adaptation is a negotiation between the past and the present. Adaptation is a science and art. Adaptation pushes boundaries and creates new futures..

It is neither possible nor desirable to be always attuned and responsive to the moods and wishes of children.

The child may feel strongly about his or her goals, but it is the parent who is raising the child and not vice versa. While retaining their empathy, adults need to achieve the self-confidence to have the last word when they are not being cruel or unreasonably arbitrary.

I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.

Language gets very confusing as it approaches this place where outside and inside touch.

It is equally dangerous at either extreme - to have either an expanding concept of mental disorder that eliminates normal or to have an expanding concept of normal that eliminates mental disorder.

Don't you kids get any ideas about dragging a trailer into the backyard. after you graduate from high school, i don't want to see you again.

narrowly focused specialists may be good at incremental innovation. But breakthrough innovation is often the product of temporary teams whose members cross disciplinary boundaries—at a time when breakthroughs in every field are, in fact, blurring those very boundaries. And this is not just a matter for scientists and researchers.

The worst enemies are the ones that live next door,

The boundaries of civilisation are not the impregnable walls civilised men take them for. As easily as smoke on the wind they can dissolve.

When you say no to the wrong people, it opens up the space for the right people to come in.

we are confined in our lives only by the limits of our own beliefs.

I remember an era when you could get your nose sliced off for sticking it too far into another man's business. Now you can find out anything about anyone with the click of a button. There is no privacy and no consideration, and everyone is prying into things that aren't their affair. You can probably check on the intertube and find out what color underwear I have on today.