Thin Places Quotes

“if you are stuck somewhere small in your mind, somewhere unhappy or afraid or paralyzed or heartbroken, all of which are a kind of claustrophobic circling and circling, you might be able to reverse-engineer an expansion, shove yourself through into some larger mind place by putting yourself in the way of some vaster spaces in the world.”
― Jordan Kisner, Thin Places: Essays Between Knowing and Nothing

“I no longer had words for the Somethingness of the world, and so it quietly receded.”
― Jordan Kisner, Thin Places: Essays from In Between

“a “heterotopia,” or a space that exists beyond the reach of normal human systems and social mores. Foucault saw heterotopias everywhere: graveyards, hospitals, boats. In heterotopias, certain inviolable binaries “that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down” collide and reveal something. In that space of breakdown between, say, “private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work,” he argues, we can look and find “the hidden presence of the sacred.”
― Jordan Kisner, Thin Places: Essays Between Knowing and Nothing

“American's unwillingness to prioritize how we deal with the dead (or the supposition that the story, or the parts of it that matter, stop with the heartbeat) may constitute a failure of moral imagination, but it absolutely fails to imagine the way the living and the dead remain connected, no matter how the living feel about it. The dead tell us how we're dying, how we're living, who among us gets a better shot than others at a whole and healthy life, and how we remain vulnerable to one another and to the vicissitudes of an unpredictable world. Our epidemics, the commonality of our despair, our continual mistakes, the progress we have yet to make, the wrongs we have yet to correct - all these things are mirrored back to us by the dead. No one likes to be reminded of these things, but they don't go away just because the bodies do.”
― Jordan Kisner, Thin Places: Essays from In Between

“Enough is revealed in the way you wait, and then in the way you leap.”
― Jordan Kisner, Thin Places: Essays from In Between