Distant Quotes

1. "Louis found me in the rear parlor, the one more distant from the noises of the tourists in the Rue Royale, and with its windows open to the courtyard below. I was in fact looking out the window, looking for the cat again, though I didn't tell myself so, and observing how our bougainvillea had all but covered the high walls that enclosed us and kept us safe from the rest of the world. The wisteria was also fierce in its growth, even reaching out from the brick walls to the railing of the rear balcony and finding its way up to the roof. I could never quite take for granted the lush flowers of New Orleans. Indeed, they filled me with happiness whenever I stopped to really look at them and surrender to their fragrance, as though I still had the right to do so, as though I still were part of nature, as though I were still a mortal man."
Author: Anne Rice

2. "James had been acting a little weird. After waking up yesterday, he'd been a little bit distant. It might just be the stress of the trip. It was probably hard on James to be in charge of the little group. He was responsible for the welfare of his lover, a nun, and a talking horse. That couldn't be easy."
Author: Anne Tenino

3. "It is sound judgment to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star."
Author: Arthur Eddington

4. "It may seem to you that your life is over now. Your future without the person you love is no future at all.Death is a head-on collision with your plans.But everything in life--the gold fillings of your teeth, the cotton of your sheets, the air you breathe, all the food you will ever eat--everything there is was born from a collision.Inside every single thing that lives is a debt to a distant star that died.Nothing new is ever created without one thing colliding into another.And something new is created when the person you love dies.Because they are not the only ones who die: you die, too. The person you were when you were with them is gone just as surely as they are.This is what you should know about losing somebody you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them."
Author: Augusten Burroughs

5. "You always say you're fine, because in reality you remain quite distant from each other, and you can't just say, "Things are terrible. If you only knew how bad I feel today."
Author: Barbara Honigmann

6. "I complain to you That restlessness is spread everywhere.It's difficult to be distantIn your love."
Author: Bethany Walkers

7. "I don't feel any different than I did when I was 40. But I realize mathematically, I'm equidistant between that and 80. I'll keep doing this for a while, but I'm not going to be one of these people who hang on just for the sake of being on the air."
Author: Bob Costas

8. "The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."
Author: Carl Sagan

9. "A new concept of god: "something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled god. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature…that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow…Mars…the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quarters known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us."
Author: Carl Sagan

10. "He seems so.. English sometimes, kind of distant or reserved, but then he'll look at me, and his eyes see right through to my soul.."
Author: Cate Tiernan

11. "A distant, eerie howl had risen out of the floor, from far beneath. Silent, absolutely still, she waited, and at last it came again, indefinably closer, but muffled, as if layers of stone-rooms, dungeons, cellars-were between her and it. Not human. She crouched down with her ear to the stone slabs. Somewhere down there, unguessable levels below,something prowled."
Author: Catherine Fisher

12. "He felt water run down his back from the damp brickwork he was sitting against, and as he worried distantly about corrosion he realised you can always fall a little further. A moment ago he thought he'd bottomed out, but now he was concerned about personal rust. Mother of fuck."
Author: Christopher Brookmyre

13. "Down the street, the trees are imprisoned equidistantly in square plots of dirt. Everything else is concrete. Lourdes remembers reading somewhere about how Dutch elm disease wiped out the entire species on the East Coast except for a lone tree in Manhattan surrounded by concrete. Is this, she wonders, how we'll all survive?"
Author: Cristina García

14. "A decision has been called for. The Nodders sit paralyzed. The Men crouch in their various holes. Tradition and Revolution, having spoken, perch high and unflinching. Fear and Loathing quietly cha-cha down the table's length.A distant referee's whistle."
Author: Dale McGowan

15. "Just to be heading away from the sea, to be immersed in a beautiful landscape again, to hear the sound of crows, was such a welcome change, and all to be seen so very appealing, a land of peace and plenty, every field perfectly cultivated, hillsides bordering the river highlighted by white limestone cliffs, every village and distant château so indisputably ancient and picturesque."
Author: David McCullough

16. "I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars."
Author: Diane Ackerman

17. "One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six."
Author: Dylan Thomas

18. "Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always responded with breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed- much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts."
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

19. "To produce the kind of landscape effects Olmsted strived to create required not months but years, even decades. "I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future," he wrote. "In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no result to be realized in less than forty years."
Author: Erik Larson

20. "Coins from half a hundred distant cities, silver and gold, copper and bronze, square coins and round coins, triangles and rings and bits of bone"
Author: George R.R. Martin

21. "Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."
Author: Hugo Black

22. "There was no sign of life round the domed emplacement of the Moonraker, and the concrete, already beginning to shimmer in the early morning sun, stretched emptily away towards Deal. It looked like a newly laid aerodome or rather, he thought, with its three disparate concrete 'things', the beehive dome,the flat-iron blast-wall, and the distant cube of the firing point, each casting black pools of shadow towards him in the early sun, like a Dali desert landscape in which three objets trouves reposed at carefully calculated random."
Author: Ian Fleming

23. "Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman ...."
Author: Italo Calvino

24. "There was a brief silence in which the distant echo of Hagrid smashing down a wooden front door seemed to reverberate through the intervening years."
Author: J.K. Rowling

25. "Clusters of distant lights was the view of Mankind that he liked the best. The lights had the archaic charm of little fires on a plain, and the frailty about them, if it did not excuse anything, at least explained a lot of Man's stubborn ruthlessness. Mankind had not started the mess that was life, after all. And on the whole, it had been an interesting species to be a part of, the girls especially, as long as you remembered to watch your back."
Author: Jean Christophe Valtat

26. "An Additional PoemWhere then shall hope and fear their objects find?The harbor cold to the mating ships,And you have lost as you stand by the balconyWith the forest of the sea calm and gray beneath.A strong impression torn from the descending lightBut night is guilty. You knew the shadowIn the trunk was ravingBut as you keep growing hungry you forget.The distant box is open. A sound of grainPoured over the floor in some eagerness--weRise with the night let out of the box of wind."
Author: John Ashbery

27. "To worship means to feel distance. But God is not distant."
Author: John Speed

28. "By the time these words are read, the centuries-old cedar, hemlock, and balsm of the cutblock known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book."
Author: John Vaillant

29. "I liked the idea, how the past could be preserved, fossilized, in the stars. I wanted to think that somewhere on the other end of time, a hundred light years from then, someone else, some distant future creature, might be looking back at a preserved image of me and my father at that very moment in my bedroom."
Author: Karen Thompson Walker

30. "I like holding it at the base." It's too long for you," he insisted, "which is why you pull your swing just before you hit the ball—" "I like a long bat," Lillian argued, even as he adjusted her hands on the willow handle. "The longer the better, as a matter of fact."A distant snicker from one of the stable boys caught her attention, and she glanced at him suspiciously before turning to face Westcliff. His face was expressionless, but there was a glitter of laughter in his eyes. "Why is that amusing?" she asked. "I have no idea," Westcliff said blandly, and turned her toward the pitcher again."
Author: Lisa Kleypas

31. "Luck is a strong horse; it can carry man to very distant places!"
Author: Mehmet Murat Ildan

32. "12.00 midnight: whilst soaking in my bath I hear a distant shout. "I'm going to bed, but I don't necessarily have to go alo-o-ne." It's Dr Chapman in the passage. He repeats the line three times, like someone selling scrap iron and it recedes along the corridor."
Author: Michael Palin

33. "But what made him still more fortunate, as he said himself, was having a daughter of such exceeding beauty, rare intelligence, gracefulness, and virtue, that everyone who knew her and beheld her marvelled at the extraordinary gifts with which heaven and nature had endowed her. As a child she was beautiful, she continued to grow in beauty, and at the age of sixteen she was most lovely. The fame of her beauty began to spread abroad through all the villages around—but why do I say the villages around, merely, when it spread to distant cities, and even made its way into the halls of royalty and reached the ears of people of every class, who came from all sides to see her as if to see something rare and curious, or some wonder-working image?"
Author: Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

34. "Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things."
Author: Miyamoto Musashi

35. "There are guys who grow up thinking they'll settle down some distant time in the future, and there are guys who are ready for marriage as soon as they meet the right person. The former bore me, mainly because they're pathetic; and the latter, quite frankly, are hard to find. But it's the serious ones I'm interested in, and it takes time to find a guy like that whom I'm equally interested in. I mean, if the relationship can't survive the long term, why on earth would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?"
Author: Nicholas Sparks

36. "The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ."
Author: Oscar Wilde

37. "I was exercised about the poor fish, as I am about all my pals, close or distant, who find themselves treading upon Life's banana skins."
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

38. "The deepest level of worship is praising God inspite of pain, trusting Him during a trial, surrenderingwhile suffering, and loving Him when He seems distant."
Author: Rick Warren

39. "People feel that decisions about their jobs, the way their children are educated, how their church functions, and products they buy are made by someone and some place so distant that they can't find anybody to talk to that has any influence over them."
Author: Robert Teeter

40. "His lips touched the back of her neck and moved along her stubborn shoulder. One hand stroked her breasts, and the other moved unerringly between her thighs; he found the most sensitive part of her and moved against her and in her until her half-formed protests turned into soft, stifled moans. The moon moved lower in the sky, tangling itself in her eyes until he closed them with surprisingly gentle kisses. Her body was the ocean and his was the wild wind -- turning ripples into foam-capped breakers that soared and curved translucently before they crashed into oblivion against distant shores."
Author: Rosemary Rogers

41. "I am so close, I may look distant.So completely mixed with you, I may look separate.So out in the open, I appear hidden.So silent, because I am constantly talking with you."
Author: Rumi

42. "They were totally alone, those kids, like each had been accidentally sent to earth from a distant planet to live among adult humans and be dependent on them for everything because compared to the adult humans they were extremely fragile creatures and didn't know the language or how anything here worked and hadn't arrived with any money. And because they were like forbidden by the humans to use their old language they'd forgotten it so they couldn't be much company or help to each other either. They couldn't even talk about the old days and so pretty soon they forgot there ever were any old days and all there was now was life on earth with adult humans who called them children and acted toward them like they owned them and like they were objects not living creatures with souls."
Author: Russell Banks

43. "Why do you so earnestly seek the truth in distant places?Look for delusion and truth in thebottom of your own heart."
Author: Ryokan

44. "These stories had intrigued her with their strange mix of violence and love, so unlike the distant, passionless affection of her own mother.She thought, she hoped, that the handkerchief was something fantastic, like a piece of a tale, but real, and just for her, a symbol of the real, hidden love of her mother."
Author: Shannon Hale

45. "Since the invention of steamships distant countries have become like those that are near at hand."
Author: Townsend Harris

46. "Libraries are fascinating places: sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of travelling to distant lands"
Author: Umberto Eco

47. "Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone's home and backyard."
Author: Vera Nazarian

48. "Songs of myselfThese are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me, If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing, If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing, If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing. This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, This the common air that bathes the globe."
Author: Walt Whitman

49. "At Gabriel College there was a very holy object on the high altar of the Oratory, covered with a black velvet cloth... At the height of the invocation the Intercessor lifted the cloth to reveal in the dimness a glass dome inside which there was something too distant to see, until he pulled a string attached to a shutter above, letting a ray of sunlight through to strike the dome exactly. Then it became clear: a little thing like a weathervane, with four sails black on one side and white on the other, began to whirl around as the light struck it. It illustrated a moral lesson, the Intercessor explained, for the black of ignorance fled from the light, whereas the wisdom of white rushed to embrace it.{Alluding to William Crookes's radiometer.}"
Author: William Crookes

50. "I never knew it before but now I know—and you, too, know—that laughter may be of different colors, Laughter is but a distant echo of an explosion within us; it may be the echo of a holiday—red, blue, and golden fireworks—or at times it may represent pieces of human flesh exploded into the air.…"
Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin

Distant Quotes Pictures