Quotes About Distance

From Zagreb to Rijeka now takes ninety minutes, to Senj two hours, and so forth. Because of the collapse of distance effected by civil engineering—to say nothing of the explosion of global tourism along the Dalmatian seaboard—Croatia has changed both economically and, to an extent, psychologically. Croatia has begun to move away from a more ethnically obsessed Balkan orientation in the direction of a more cosmopolitan Mediterranean one.

With one change of buses I am in Split in under two and a half hours

I dwell with a strangely aching heart In that vanished abode there far apart

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those Not in position to look too close.

Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.

But the flower leaned aside And thought of naught to say, And morning found the winter breeze A hundred miles away.

Far as we aim our signs to reach, Far as we often make them reach, Across the soul-from-soul abyss, There is an aeon-limit set Beyond which they are doomed to miss. Two souls may be too widely met. That sad-with-distance river beach With mortal longing may beseech; It cannot speak as far as this.

Only at some distance in time and place do you understand the significance of the crossing over—finding in the ritual retelling a way of sanctifying the memory.

Many men are intimidated by beauty and prefer to worship it from afar; others are drawn in, but not for the purpose of conversation. The Beauty suffers from isolation.

Your targets cannot idealize you if they know too much about you, if they start to see you as all too human. Not only must you maintain a degree of distance, but there must be something fantastical and bewitching about you, sparking all kinds of delightful possibilities in their mind.

Remember: seduction is a game of attention, of slowly filling the other person's mind with your presence. Distance and inattention will create the opposite effect, and can be used as a tactic when the need arises.

Honestly, she sighed, I don't know what kind of life we'll have together, with me always flying off in one direction and you in the other. I smiled. It's a good thing the world's round, I said.

Lo echabas de menos? Por supuesto. Sobre todo la intimidad. Ya no teníamos la misma. Teníamos un trato cordial y formalmente agradable y educado, pero nada más. No

Someone was out there, watching from afar.

She was like the dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent at the house, silences that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell.

I used to picture us as two leaves, blowing miles apart in the wind yet bound by the deep tangled roots of the tree from which we had both fallen.

I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle.

It's a half bridge, really, as only four of its original arches remain. It ends midway across the river. Like it reached, tried to reunite with, the other side and fell short.

He caminado mucho y desde muy lejos para ver si eres tan bello en la realidad como lo eras en mis sueños.

Mais la bataille qui se livrait en lui se lisait sur son visage. Et sa peur aussi. Pas seulement celle qu'il éprouvait pour moi et ce qui risquait de m'arriver à 4500 kilomètres de chez nous. Mais aussi la peur qu'il avait de moi. Sa peur de me perdre. Sa peur devant mon absence, de réduire en pièces son coeur mis à nu et vulnérable si je le décidais, comme un doberman déchiquetant un chaton.

The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.

You hold me at arm's length.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.   —Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers

There was so much force and beauty in the windows, such unsettled sadness in what little I knew of Rose's life, all her longing, her distance from her daughter. Just knowing she had existed opened new and uneasy possibilities within my understanding of the story I'd always thought I'd known by heart. ... Whoever Rose had been, she was gone, unable to speak for herself, fading into the past as surely as these rainy colors were diffusing, even now [p. 142].