Quotes About Liminality

Not so much living, but a hovering without sense.

What the neutral zone is and why it exists can be seen in figure 4.1. It is a time when all the old clarities break down and everything is in flux. Things are up in the air. Nothing is a given anymore, and anything could happen. No one knows the answers: one person says one thing and someone else says something completely different.

Well, limbo is not a good place to be.

This is the seashore. Neither land nor sea. It's a place that does not exist.

I've spent so much time these last years wondering what I'm supposed to be. A wife? A lover? A celibate? An Italian? A glutton? A traveler? An artist? A Yogi? But I'm not any of these things, at least not completely. And I'm not Crazy Aunt Liz, either. I'm just a slippery antevasin - betwixt and between - a student on the ever-shifting border near the wonderful, scary forest of the new.

She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death, sleeping and waking.

Questa è la riva del mare. […] Né terra né mare. E' un luogo che non esiste.

there is always a very precise moment for words like that to be uttered; then it passes and it is too late. Just as the moment for words like sorry or I love you is a brief one, fleeting and irreplaceable; a moment of liminality, perhaps.

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

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

We move between two darknesses.

Psychologists have a special word for uncomfortable life transitions: "liminality."[3] It means the time between work roles, organizations, career paths, and relationship stages.

Psychologists have a special word for uncomfortable life transitions: "liminality."[3] It means the time between work roles, organizations, career paths, and relationship stages. The author Bruce Feiler wrote a popular book in 2020 on liminality called Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age.[4]

Deidre called it twilight. Rita had seen the word written out, all right, but she'd never heard anyone really say it. Twilight.

So often these days she seemed to hover between worlds, none of them wholly real.

I feel I'm living in parentheses

Religion appears in this book as it does in my other work on religion, media, and consumption—not as a solid, circumscribed, institutional, organized entity but more as (to borrow a phrase from author Anne Lamott) "the water at the edge of things.

The anthropologist Lawrence Cohen describes conferences and conventions not so much as scholarly goings-on but as carnivals—"colossal events where academic proceedings are overshadowed by professional politics, ritual enactments of disciplinary boundaries, sexual liminality, tourism and trade, personal and national rivalries, the care and feeding of professional kinship, and the sheer enormity of discourse.

Well, limbo is not a good place to be.

Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that we are most free to explore identity in places outside of our normal routines, places that are in some way "betwixt and between." Turner calls them liminal, from the Latin word for "threshold.

What is the pain of being human? It's the condition of being suspended between two worlds and being unable to fully enter into either.

In many of the novels I have discussed in this chapter, the position of the reader vis-a-vis the protagonist is central to the construction of liminality.

I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.

I am alone in my room, between two worlds