Daily Inspiration Quote by A. B. Yehoshua

Yehoshua frames “boundaries” as something more intimate than borders on a map: they’re the invisible lines that organize a life - between self and other, loyalty and freedom, private desire and public obligation. The sentence lands because it refuses the comforting fantasy that boundaries are either sacred or irrelevant. Instead, they’re presented as a daily negotiation with moral consequences. He doesn’t ask whether we should have boundaries; he asks how we live with them without turning them into prisons.

The phrasing is quietly prosecutorial. “What permission we have” implies that crossing a boundary is never purely personal. Someone grants, withholds, or contests that permission: family, community, the state, tradition, history. Even when you feel “authorized” by love or necessity, Yehoshua hints, you’re still entangled in other people’s claims. That’s the subtext: transgression is rarely solitary; it’s social, and it leaves a ledger.

Context matters because Yehoshua wrote from inside a society where boundaries are existential and political, but his fiction keeps returning to how national conflicts echo inside domestic rooms. In his work, the drama isn’t only that lines exist; it’s that people manufacture elaborate stories to justify crossing them - affairs, friendships, ideological conversions, acts of violence, acts of mercy. The final clause, “and how we do so,” is the blade. It suggests that the ethics of crossing aren’t settled by the cause alone; they’re judged by the method - whether you cross with humility, coercion, secrecy, or care.