distance Quotes

“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way [...] fifty miles at the very limits of conception. ”

“Families can go years without hearing a thing, only to find their sons and daughters waiting on the front doorstep, home on leave or sometimes blissfully discharged. But usually you receive a letter made of heavy paper, stamped with the king’s crown seal below a short thank-you for your child’s life. Maybe you even get a few buttons from their torn, obliterated uniforms.”

“In trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them.”

“She wrote to my father in Israel almost every day on expensive French stationary, and when she ran out of that she wrote to him on graph paper torn out of a notebook.”

“So now Jim was the kite, the wild twine cut, and whatever wisdom was his taking him away from Will who could only run, earthbound, after one so high and dark silent and suddenly strange.”

“Of those we have wronged, and of our enemies or rivals, it is not the passionate and outspoken whom we have to fear, but the quiet, dissembling, unscrupulous; since we never know when they are upon us, we can never be sure they are at a safe distance.”

The roaring seas and many a dark range of mountains lie between us.

“I married a man who worked for the telephone company! [. . .] A telephone man who—fell in love with long-distance!”

“I say this to convince myself. But I know the truth.I would’ve fallen in love with him at a distance.”

“The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything in space in the past--some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.”

“If I saw someone across the street who did the things to me that I routinely do to me, I’d run in the opposite direction. But I can’t, can I?”

“In the distance thunder echoed round the mountains. The air was heavy and humid. I was sweating, but the sweat was turning cold in my forehead. I jumped across the ditch of the last terraced field and looked down to where my home had always been. The house was gone.”

“After traveling for what seemed to be a great distance, Manyara came to a small clearing. There, silhouetted against the moonlight, was an old woman seated on a large stone. The old woman spoke. ‘I will give you some advice, Manyara. Soon after you pass the place where two paths cross, you will see a grove of trees. They will laugh at you. You must not laugh in return. Later, you will meet a man with his head under his arm. You must be polite to him.’ ”

“Way off in the distance she could see the lights of the city. The Little House was curious about the city and wondered what it would be like to live there.”

“The three children stood looking at each other in the middle of the Australian desert. Motionless as the outcrops of granite they stared, and stared, and stared. Between them the distance was less than the spread of an outstretched arm, but more than a hundred thousand years.”