Border Quotes

“Yo no soy mexicano. Yo no soy gringo. Yo no soy chicano. No soy gringo en USA y mexicano en Mexico. Soy chicano en todas partes. No tengo que asimilarme a nada. Tengo mi propia historia.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything - love, convictions, faith, history - no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides on the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Nobody can turn you into a slave unless you allow them. Nobody can make you afraid of anything, unless you allow them. Nobody can tell you to do something wrong, unless you allow them. God never created you to be a slave, man did. God never created division or set up any borders between brothers, man did. God never told you hurt or kill another, man did. So why is man your god, and not the Creator?”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!”
― Rudyard Kipling, Kipling: Poems

“A Sanskrit word appeared in the paragraph: ANTEVASIN. It means, ‘one who lives at the border.’ In ancient times, this was a literal description. It indicated a person who had left the bustling center of worldly life to go live at the edge of the forest where the spiritual masters dwelled. The antevasin was not of the villager’s anymore-not a householder with a conventional life. But neither was he yet a transcendent-not one of those sages who live deep in the unexplored woods, fully realized. The antevasin was an in-betweener. He was a border-dweller. He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. And he was a scholar.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“She needed Andrew Simpson Smith, it was that simple. And he had spent his life training to help people like her. Gods.
"Okay, Andrew. But let's leave today. I'm in a hurry."
"Of course. Today." He stroked the place where his slight beard was beginning to grow. "These ruins where your friends are waiting? Where are they?"
Tally glances up at the sun, still low enough to indicate the eastern horizon. After a moment's calculation, she pointed off to the northwest, back toward the city and beyond that, the Rusty Ruins. "About a week's walk that way."
"A week?"
"That means seven days."
"Yes, I know the gods' calendar," he said huffily. "But a whole week?"
"Yeah. That's not so far, is it?" The hunters had been tireless on their march the night before.
He shook his head, an awed expression on his face. "But that is beyond the edge of the world.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Pretties

“A safe army is better than a safe border”
― Bhim Rao Ambedkar

“There are no clear borders,
Only merging invisible to the sight.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, Circling: 1978-1987

“Dear if your limits and my limits were same
Our borders would not have been separate”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“The notion that where one is from can be understood using what remains of that place opens up a highly sensitive and rich terrain that can help unpack belonging, especially if that place has now been rendered inaccessible by national borders.”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“His mind lingered for a time in the hinterlands of sleep, words drifting over the border as though on a warm wind, unfastened from their meanings.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“Stop breaking families.
Start building them”
― Jill Telford

“A Musafir in life
today I am here on
this side of the border
tomorrow I will be there
on the other side.

Searching for meaning
with my pen and journal
in my bag, I keep drifting
from here to there and
from there to here

A Musafir in life
there is no final home for me
no final destination awaits me
To keep on traveling is
my life's story
To keep on searching is
my life's purpose”
― Avijeet Das

“Mexico has fairly strict gun laws. It actually has a right to bear arms in the Mexican constitution. But to do this - there's only one shop which sells them legally in the whole of Mexico, run by the army. You go, and then you have to present seven types of identification, including a letter from your employer and a clean criminal record. And the cartels, the gangsters, they don't use that way of getting guns 'cause they can get them so much more easily buying them in the United States.”
― Ioan Grillo

“Of course, the illegals have always been called names other than human--wetback, taco-bender. (A Mexican worker said: "If I am a wetback because I crossed a river to get here, what are you, who crossed an entire ocean?') In politically correct times, "illegal alien" was deemed gauche, so "undocumented worker" came into favor. Now, however, the term preferred by the Arizona press is "undocumented entrant." As if the United States were a militarized beauty pageant.

Maye it is.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“His life cries for an unknown land of joy;
where sadness lingers between border lines
His discolored steps towards the decoy
misconstrued as the mystery declines

From the poem Sonnet For A Man (Part II)”
― Munia Khan, To Evince the Blue

“The two bodies lay in plain sight of the shuttered Salt Bingo Casino, though there are no witnesses other than a coyote and its jackrabbit prey. The two bodies lay still until the sun-cracked it is light over the Arizona desert like a sky egg.”
― Jennifer Leeper, The Poison of War

“No country can find its growth when its people welfare policies are only within its border”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“E adesso, vecchio barbagianni, questa fottuta frontiera ti mancherà," (…). Diavolo, pensai, non c’è nessuna ragione per rimpiangere la frontiera.

In breve tempo capii. Mi mancava il sogno, la linea d'ombra da valicare, il senso del proibito. La mia prima spinta al viaggio non era nata proprio dall'esistenza della Frontiera?”
― Paolo Rumiz, The Fault Line: Traveling the Other Europe, From Finland to Ukraine

“Who’s going to cross the border
When a land suffers from ‘human disorder’
Under the bunk bed, into the cave
All mute men there ready to rave
Talking mouth: sealed, mission fulfilled
Not much, only a few million killed!

From the poem Invisible Sign”
― Munia Khan, The Half Circle

“YOUR COUNTRY EXTENDS AS FAR AS YOU CAN THINK, ELSE WHEREVER YOU PUT YOUR FOOT THERE IS A BOUNDARY

जहां तक तू सोचेगा वहां तक ही मुल्क होगा
वर्ना तू पांव रखेगा जहां, वहीं सीमा पायेगा”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“They look stern at first, do a lot of scowling, but behind their eyes, once you get them talking, there's a hurt, docile quality, possibly related to past wrongs done them, a quality I associate with the thunked-as-kids: Long ago the world turned on them in some unexpected and unpleasant way, and they are, not unreasonably, expecting that it could happen again at any moment.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“[Mexicali is] a town like an American town, like the American town just across the river, in fact, if you drained half the money out and let it sit awhile. See it in fast motion: Stores close, streets go dirty, entropy increases, dark moneymaking schemes multiply, people's dreams begin to be of leaving.

This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eliminate disparity, the traffic stops.

If Mexico were as rich as we are, we'd only be getting their tourists.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“Prisoner and invasion are limited there will be a reaction when it crosses the border.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“He said that some nights he heard the tom-tom beat of his passion, but he didn't know for sure whether it was really the beat of his passion or of his youth slipping through his fingers, maybe, he added, it's just the beat of poetry, the beat that comes to us all without exception at some mysterious hour, easily missed but absolutely free.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Woes of the True Policeman

“At the end of the day, no religion, no border, no philosophy can separate all of us. We are humans!”
― Avijeet Das

“As Smollett relates, Dumbarton has always sat on the edge of something. Historically, it has marked the line between the Romans and Picts, between the Picts and Britons, and between Highlands and Lowlands. The area has been a geographic, social, cultural, linguistic, agricultural and economic border zone for millennia. This liminal status seems to fascinate Smollett, and he returns to it again and again in his writing.”
― Craig Smith, The Scottish Enlightenment: Human Nature, Social Theory and Moral Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Christopher J. Berry

“The border remains a fluid, mutating, stubbornly troubling, enthusiastically lethal region. Perhaps it's not a region at all. Maybe it's just an idea nobody can agree on. A conversation that never ends, even when it becomes an argument and all participants kick over the table and spill their drinks and stomp out of the room.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“English: "The boundaries between words are not identical to the boundaries of phenomena in the world."

Česky: „Hranice mezi slovy nejsou totožné s hranicemi jevů ve světě.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“English: "Stupidity consists of limitation, madness of limitlessness, and genius of their balance."

Česky: „Hloupost spočívá v omezenosti, bláznovství v bezmeznosti a genialita v jejich rovnováze.”
― Sebastián Wortys