Quotes about Distance

There is a way of avoiding a person which resembles a search.

Happiness and despair do not breathe the same air. A man in despair participates in the life of others from a great distance; he is almost unaware of their presence; he has lost any consciousness of his own existence; he is a thing of flesh and blood but feels that he is no longer real; he sees himself only as a dream.

This is at the beginning of my book: When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind. Victor Hugo

In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there.

All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of a hunting horn coming from the depths of distant forests. There were paths in those forests...

I have certainly had my share of long-distance love affairs.

The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small.

It would be all right if I could pray in this way, or in that other way, if I were just able to give You the only thing You want: not my thoughts and feelings and resolutions, but myself. But that is just what I am unable to do, because in the superficiality of the ordinary routine into which my life is cast, I am a stranger to myself. And how can I seek You, being so distant, how can I give myself up to You, when I haven't been able as yet to find myself?

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

When twilight drops her curtain down And pins it with a star Remember that you have a friend Though she may wander far.

She never knew where he was, in what city or on what continent, the day after she had seen him. He always came to her unexpectedly—and she liked it, because it made him a continuous presence in her life, like the ray of a hidden light that could hit her at any moment.

There were no traces of human existence around them. Old ruts, overgrown with grass, made human presence seem more distant, adding the distance of years to the distance of miles. A haze of twilight remained over the ground, but in the breaks between the tree trunks there were leaves that hung in patches of shining green and seemed to light the forest. The leaves hung still. They walked, alone to move through a motionless world. She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time.