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# Weekend Words: Brink
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-brink/
- Published: 2013-09-29T13:00:32.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:34:36.000Z
- Description: This week, after years of wrangling, threats and doomsaying, we've received an actual date — October 17th — when the U.S. will run out of cash. Two and a half weeks and then, the brink.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:59 (2012, 2013, part 2)

![Albrecht Dürer, "The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand" (detail) (1508), oil on canvas transferred from panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. (Image via Web Gallery of Art)](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/09/durer-640.jpg)

Albrecht Dürer, “The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand” (detail) (1508), oil on canvas transferred from panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. (Image via Web Gallery of Art)

This week, after years of wrangling, threats and doomsaying, we’ve received an actual date — October 17th — when the U.S. will run out of cash. Two and a half weeks and then, the brink.

> “You are the breathless hush of evening that trembles on the brink of song.”  
>  
> **—Oscar Hammerstein, “All the Things You Are”**

> “My errors will point to thinking men the various roads, and will teach them the great art of treading on the brink of the precipice without falling into it.”  
>  
> **—Giacomo Casanova**

> “With how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.”  
>  
> **—Mary Shelley, *Frankenstein***

> Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one’s talent, and one’s inner happiness.  
>  
> **—George Sand**

> With them who stood upon the brink of the great gulf which none can see beyond, Time, so soon to lose itself in vast Eternity, rolled on like a mighty river, swollen and rapid as it nears the sea.  
>  
> **—Charles Dickens, *Barnaby Rudge***