Quotes About Distance

Face-to-face, real-time connection to others feels fraught and awkward compared to the safe distance of digital communication. We maintain intimate virtual contact with strangers but seem increasingly isolated from our closest friends and family members.

From a distance, the solid ground of marriage has a way of looking mundane and exotic at the same time.

She was always threatening to move to be nearer to Rosie and the boys, but Wisconsin was- obviously, nonnegotiably, self-evidently-too cold. So she stayed in Pheonix and held the weather to her heart as a talisman, clutched to her breast against all counteroffers. But she came up for the summers. Pheonix's weather need not be clutched to the breast for June through September.

Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.

The amount of communal participation in prayer is in inverse ratio to the combined vertical and horizontal distance between the leader of the prayers and the first occupied row of seats.

Irony has always seemed the best approach to life, the best way to keep it at arm's length.

If you can see a thing whole ... it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need a distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.

Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.

Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

I've seen lifelong friends drift apart over golf just because one could play better, but the other counted better.

Newton's law of gravity says that the acceleration of any object as it orbits another is proportional to the mass of the body it is orbiting.......Thus if you know the speed of a body in orbit around a star and its distance from the star, you can measure the mass of that star. The same holds for stars in orbit around the center of their galaxy; by measuring the orbital speeds of the stars, you can measure the distribution of mass in that galaxy.

Whether it was the stimulus of the radio, or simply that he was growing up, or both, he saw everything about him in a new way, as though he had managed to get a little distance off so that his sight wasn't blurred by being too close.

I love no one but you, I have discovered, but you are far away and I am here alone. Then this is my life and maybe, however unlikely, I'll find my way back there. Or maybe, one day, I'll settle for second best. And on that same day, hell will freeze over, the sun will burn out and the stars will fall from the sky.

It was a curious feeling, that something could be so close and so distant at the same time.

I thought maybe if I stared hard enough, I could see the lights of the city I had left so very far behind. This was nonsense, of course, but there's nothing wrong with occasionally staring out the window and thinking nonsense, as long as the nonsense is yours.

I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip form slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory.

It doesn't matter if you never see someone again, I told myself. There are millions of people in the world, and most of them never see each other in the first place.

And a town not too far from where you live has a law that bars me from coming within five miles of its borders

It is a lonely feeling when someone you care about becomes a stranger

Keep the home fires burning,While your hearts are yearning;Though your lads are far awayThey dream of home.There's a silver liningThrough the dark cloud shining;Turn the dark cloud inside out,Till the boys come home.

July 29, 1949 letter to Truman Capote, in Tangiers, Morocco) You have probably never received those delicious epistles which I never wrote—let alone sent. But there you are selling grain in the marketplace with little Jane [Bowles]—and now both of you adored by Berbers and strange wide-eyed men such as have never adored me. When are you coming home to your sweet old bald-head mom?

He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.

He stepped down, avoiding any long look at her as one avoids long looks at the sun, but seeing her as one sees the sun, without looking.

For a few seconds they looked silently into each other's eyes, and the distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable.