Threshold Quotes

“All in all, nothing human is worth taking very seriously; nevertheless”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“One of the less remarked-upon barbarities of the five-day working week is how it imposes on the weekend a manic, anxiety-ridden quality: workers are so desperate to enjoy themselves that they can only fail to do so; they run around like convicts on day release, finally drinking themselves into a stupor because at least alcohol makes it seem that time is not passing, it is present, that we are not elsewhere, we are here and now. The worker's grim determination to enjoy his two days off has the effect of ruining those two days, filling them with worry and the bitter knowledge that soon it will be Monday again, and he will spend five dreary shifts anticipating the next weekend, which, like all the others, will be a disappointment.”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“Time rushes past. We become swept up in life’s tumult. Years go by, full of drama and event. We roam the world. And then, during moments of calm, we see that time hasn’t really gone anywhere, just as we ourselves are right where we were ten years earlier, though our skin is tougher and lines are etched in our faces.”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“Buddhism offered a blueprint for living that was not moralistic but rational – Buddhists rarely spoke of good or evil, only of skilful or unskilful actions. It did not require the abdication of reason but rather reason’s”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“By drifting from city to city, I could maintain the appearance of motion,” he admits, “when in truth I was going nowhere.”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“This was why I loved clubs in Berlin, why dancing had become as needful to me as reading or laughing: the ease of access to a state of unselfconsciousness. There was always someone older or younger, nakeder or weirder than you, and the fact that photography was forbidden and there were no mirrors anywhere reinforced the ethos of participation over gawking, immersion over separation. In the crowd you lost any distinction between dancing and being danced, broke clear of selfhood right at the point where the self became exalted and sovereign.
This did not feel like decadence — this was political. These men and women would go back out to the world empowered and awake.”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“Such troughs of fatigue, a factor in my life for as long as I could remember, seemed to be growing deeper and more frequent as I got older. I was hardly into my thirties but already I felt the diminishment of vitality associated with middle age - in fact, I had always felt it, even when I was twenty-one, or seventeen. Perhaps I was born middle-aged, I thought. I wondered, not for the first time, whether I suffered from an undiagnosed case of chronic fatigue syndrome - or whether, more simply, I was a lazy bastard.”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold

“It is said that any populace is only three missed meals away from revolution, but not enough has been made of the insurrectionary potential of a water supply that unexpectedly dries up.”
― Rob Doyle, Threshold