Quotes About Distance

All of my stages were different suits of armor that kept me from becoming too engaged and too vulnerable. Each strategy was built on the same premise: Keep everyone at a safe distance and always have an exit strategy.

Rather than being a tool for connection, sympathy emerged in the data as a form of disconnection. Sympathy is removed: When someone says, "I feel sorry for you" or "That must be terrible," they are standing at a safe distance. Rather than conveying the powerful "me too" of empathy, it communicates "not me," and then adds, "But I do feel for you." Sympathy is more likely to be a shame trigger than something that heals shame.

Very early in our training, we are taught that a cool distance and inaccessibility contribute to prestige, and that if you're too relatable, your credentials come into question.

Since keeping a distance hadn't stopped him from thinking about her, he'd abandoned his campaign of avoidance for a new tack-spend as much time with her as possible in the hope that she would want him as much as he wanted her.

In nature all things are close to or distant from each other. The psychological world knows first the intermediate region of distance seducing to nearness, nearness pressing towards distance, of an irreconcilable closeness-distance.

Just as no significant work of art can be created without the element of irrationality that is in fact the artist's talent. p.179 He wondered if there was a greater distance than the one between two people in the same bed pretending to sleep. p.213

In life, people walked together part of the way. Then their paths diverged, so slowly and unnoticed that it wasn't clear what had happened until it was too late. And by that time they were already out of sight of each other.

Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe.

The farther I run away from the place where God dwells, the less I am able to hear the voice that calls me the Beloved, and the less I hear that voice, the more entangled I become in the manipulations and power games of the world.

Compassion can never coexist with judgment because judgment creates the distance, the distinction, which prevents us from really being with the other.

We probably will never be free from all our hostilities, and there even may be days and weeks in which our hostile feelings dominate our emotional life to such a degree that the best thing we can do is to keep distance, speak little to others and not write letters, except to ourselves.

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to the other

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

When the far mountains are invisible, the near ones look the higher.

We are more of the earth, Farther from heaven these days.

So inconsiderable an object is misery to light minds when it is at any distance.

His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.

Mrs. Gotch a wide berth—I couldn't talk to them.  I could

There were immensities between you.

The whole past is between them.

Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.

Your nearness is the nearness of planets. I am the void between you. If I withdraw there will be no void for you to swim in.