Distance Quotes

There is a magic in distance. Look back at the golden lamp-lit rooms of your home from the road of your life, and it all for a moment is exactly how you hoped it would be: warm, peaceful, safe.

~ Kate Lord Brown

Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed in the face as you step further away; the face then is part of a body, and then the body is framed in a doorway, then the doorway framed in the trees beside it. The path grows longer and the door smaller, the trees fill up your sight and the door is lost, then the path is lost in the woods and the woods lost in the hills. Yet somewhere in the center still is the kiss. That's what time is like.

~ John Crowley

No separation of distance, no separation of time, no separation of any kind need lessen compassion.

~ Zechariah Barrett

I was in awe of the mystery of human compassion and the inability of love to make the distance between us any more bearable.

~ Keith Hollihan

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.

~ Bill Bryson

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.“Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Some trips are more than distance traveled in miles.

~ Lucy Knisley

Distance is the journey. Displacement is the result.

~ Jaclyn Moriarty

No friend to Love like a long voyage at sea.

~ Aphra Behn

I was 8,569 miles away, 37 butt-numbing hours of travel across seven time zones in the last two days, or was it three? Amelia Earhart, eat your heart out.

~ Kristine K. Stevens

It seemed like all the way to tomorrow and over it to the days beyond.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Not enough people realize that ADHD is not a disorder about loss of focus. It is a disorder of loss of emotional control, which is triggered by outside influences, self-esteem and our interpretation of events. Whether this is positive or negative it triggers us to hyper focus on what consumes our thoughts. Staying positive is critical and distancing oneself from hurtful people is essential, in order to live a life with purpose.

~ Shannon L. Alder

...Heracles was strangely silent. What is he thinking? / Geryon wondered. / Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts. / Even when they were lovers / he had never known what Herakles was thinking. Once in a while he would say, / Penny for your thoughts! / and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish / he'd eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago. / What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them / developed a dangerous cloud.

~ Anne Carson

But nothing makes a room feel emptier than wanting someone in it.

~ Calla Quinn

paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer

~ V.s. Naipaul

And it was in that moment of distress and confusion that the whip of terror laid its most nicely calculated lash about his heart. It dropped with deadly effect upon the sorest spot of all, completely unnerving him. He had been secretly dreading all the time that it would come - and come it did.Far overhead, muted by great height and distance, strangely thinned and wailing, he heard the crying voice of Defago, the guide.The sound dropped upon him out of that still, wintry sky with an effect of dismay and terror unsurpassed. The rifle fell to his feet. He stood motionless an instant, listening as it were with his whole body, then staggered back against the nearest tree for support, disorganized hopelessly in mind and spirit. To him, in that moment, it seemed the most shattering and dislocating experience he had ever known, so that his heart emptied itself of all feeling whatsoever as by a sudden draught.'Oh! oh! This fiery height! Oh, my feet of fire! My burning feet of fire...' ran in far, beseeching accents of indescribable appeal this voice of anguish down the sky. Once it called - then silence through all the listening wilderness of trees.And Simpson, scarcely knowing what he did, presently found himself running wildly to and fro, searching, calling, tripping over roots and boulders, and flinging himself in a frenzy of undirected pursuit after the Caller. Behind the screen of memory and emotion with which experience veils events, he plunged, distracted and half-deranged, picking up false lights like a ship at sea, terror in his eyes and heart and soul. For the Panic of the Wilderness had called to him in that far voice - the Power of untamed Distance - the Enticement of the Desolation that destroys. He knew in that moment all the pains of someone hopelessly and irretrievably lost, suffering the lust and travail of a soul in the final Loneliness. A vision of Defago, eternally hunted, driven and pursued across the skyey vastness of those ancient forests fled like a flame across the dark ruin of his thoughts...It seemed ages before he could find anything in the chaos of his disorganized sensations to which he could anchor himself steady for a moment, and think...The cry was not repeated; his own hoarse calling brought no response; the inscrutable forces of the Wild had summoned their victim beyond recall - and held him fast.(The Wendigo)

~ Algernon Blackwood

He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar, EVERYTHING came out, eventually, somehow. But the PROCESS – how he put together a story about the world’s workings – that was mysterious beyond all ken. In a way, she thought, it was the only disappointing thing about having a child. She’d imagined he would stay transparent to her, more PART of her, for so much longer. But despite the proximity of the daily work, Edgar had ceased long before to be an open book. A friend, yes. A son she loved, yes. But when it came to knowing his thoughts, Edgar could be opaque as a rock.

~ David Wroblewski

I’ve been in the Wilds for a month and a half now, and in that time I’ve almost forgotten about the fences. It’s amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

~ Lauren Oliver

It's like we've been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me down there, killing myself in slow motion.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Her stare fixed me. Without rancour and without regret; without triumph and without evil; as Desdemona once looked back on Venice. On the incomprehension, the baffled rage of Venice. I had taken myself to be in some way the traitor Iago punished, in an unwritten sixth act. Chained in hell. But I was also Venice; the state left behind; the thing journeyed from.

~ John Fowles

Always distance yourself from gossip, because it is the worst form of self-disruption.

~ Gift Gugu Mona

Time & distance does wonders for healing & rejuvenating your soul.

~ April Mae Monterrosa

To everyone who kept staring at the horizon, it always seemed like the earth and sky met and kissed each other, the very thought of that seemed to make every single thing in the universe beautiful. But only the sky and earth knew the distance between them, only they knew the fact that they could never be together.

~ Akshay Vasu

A conscious act grew out of this by the time I began writing stories: getting my distance, a prerequisite of my understanding of human events, is the way I begin work. Just as, of course, it was an initial step when, in my first journalism job, I stumbled into making pictures with a camera. Frame, proportion, perspective, the values of light and shade; all are determined by the distance of the observing eye.

~ Eudora Welty

It may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly.

~ Peter Høeg

could not sleep last nightbed cover of unease distance kept me awake windy whispers in summer nightwas telling you were awake one corner to another rollinglike swimming in a competitionmy heart wanted to seeyou then n thenwe live ,we loveon same earth mostlyrare within a real another world don't allow usto sleep in side your ,or mine restful love©litymunshi

~ Litymunshi

I am foolish in the way distance makes me feel partial.

~ Taylor Patton

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

God told us to love everyone. However, when you don’t like someone then you need to walk away and focus not on him or her, but the hatred you’re harboring. Otherwise, you will allow your piety to take over. Before you know it, you’re using the gospel as a sword to slice other religious people apart, which have offended you. From your point of helplessness, it will be is easy to recruit people that will mistake your kindness as righteousness, when in reality it is a hidden agenda to humiliate through the words of Christ. This game is so often used by women in the Christian faith, that it is the number one reason why many people become inactive. It is a silent, unspoken hypocrisy that is inconsistent with the teachings of the gospel. If you choose not to like someone, then avoid them. If you wish to love them, the only way to overcome your frustrations is through empathy, prayer, forgiveness and allowing yourself time to heal through distance. Try focusing on what you share as sisters in the gospel, rather than the negative aspects you dislike about that person.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Ultimately virility is all about helping others express their reluctantly shared feelings while doing so from a safe distance.

~ Ken Poirot

Distance can make a love fade, while closeness can make hate flare; as distance can make hate fade, while closeness can make love flare.

~ Anthony Liccione

Do you think it’s funny that both of our favorite memories are about the people we like the least now?” I ask.“Maybe that’s why we dislike them,” she says. “The distance between who they were and who they are is so wide, we have no hope of getting them back.

~ Nicola Yoon

While the truth is putting on its shoes, the lie becomes a champion of a long-distance running.

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

This universe is ocean of happiness where distance is measured in Smiles Per Hour, more the mileage more the happiness.

~ Vikrmn

With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary—the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation.

~ Edwin Powell Hubble

Distance is not a gulf but a bridge between lovers.

~ Marty Rubin

Distance is a bridge, not a gulf, between lovers.

~ Marty Rubin

Hide the miles between usRun to meLike you run yourFingers through my hairDesire in every digit, in every touch.Run to meLike rivers run in springtimeFilled with renewing loveAs they do with the melting snow.Fly to meAs the birds fly the continentsCommitted to build their nests.Fly to meAs a cottonwood fluff in the airAll over me, head to toe, gentlyCome here.

~ Veronika Jensen

Let the devil bar my way, I will come back to ye.

~ Susanna Kearsley

Men dream more about coming home than about leaving.

~ Paulo Coelho