Quotes about distance
page 5

“If the wind murmurs then they seem to hear
His voice; and when night falls, the shadows round
Seem the dark foldings of his sweeping robe.
At noon, when life sees only the clear sky,
Feels only the bright sun, the fated one
Whom Death hath called, upon the distance marks
The heavy shade so soon to shroud
All nature from their eyes.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Translations, From the French

Life, Death, Fate, Feeling

“the distance
between this pigeon's brain
and mine
is minute compared to that
between mine
and Bodhi's
Wisdom
Compassion”

Frederick Franck (1909–2006) Dutch painter

Source: Echoes from the Bottomless Well (1985), p. 137

Wisdom

“I … take a selfie with him; two, to be safe. My lips are parted, as if I'm poking a dead thing to see if it'll come to life; it's the phone I'm attempting to keep at a distance. He's smiling faintly, as if amuse by some exotic piece of wildlife.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

Life, Smile, Parting, Dead

“On the 24th of the same month I went to see the fort of Kangra, and gave an order that the Qazi, the Chief Justice (Mir'Adl), and other learned men of Islam should accompany me and carry out in the fort whatever was customary, according to the religion of Muhammad. Briefly, having traversed about one koss, I went up to the top of the fort, and by the grace of God, the call to prayer and the reading of the Khutba and the slaughter of a bullock which had not taken place from the commencement of the building of the fort till now, were carried out in my presence. I prostrated myself in thanksgiving for this great gift, which no king had hoped to receive, and ordered a lofty mosque to be built inside the fort' ….'After going round the fort I went to see the temple of Durga, which is known as Bhawan. A world has here wandered in the desert of error. Setting aside the infidels whose custom is the worship of idols, crowds of the people of Islam, traversing long distances, bring their offerings and pray to the black stone (image)' Some maintain that this stone, which is now a place of worship for the vile infidels, is not the stone which was there originally, but that a body of the people of Islam came and carried off the original stone, and threw it into the bottom of the river, with the intent that no one could get at it. For a long time the tumult of the infidels and idol-worshippers had died away in the world, till a lying brahman hid a stone for his own ends, and going to the Raja of the time said: 'I saw Durga in a dream, and she said to me: They have thrown me into a certain place: quickly go and take me up.”

Jahangir (1569–1627) 4th Mughal Emperor

The Raja, in the simplicity of his heart, and greedy for the offerings of gold that would come to him, accepted the tale of the brahman and sent a number of people with him, and brought that stone, and kept it in this place with honour, and started again the shop of error and misleading
Kangra (Himachal Pradesh) , Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, translated into English by Alexander Rogers, first published 1909-1914, New Delhi Reprint, 1978, Vol. II, pp. 223-25.

Men, God, People, World

“She watched the lights upon the shore. The glare that was Plymouth in the distance. She thought, the dance is over. The girls are going out of the overheated hall into the cold air. They shiver; their young men hurry after them. Some have got home and find their dresses stained or torn; yet they've enjoyed themselves. Which is the more important? Wallflowers think of the young men who haven't danced with them; probably each has a dream-day hero. Remember the lieutenant to whom I never spoke a word; yet I married him and had children and grandchildren, though he never knew it. And there are others, madly happy, look in their mirrors and smile and wonder. Even the latest home has a warm bed to go to.”

Arthur Calder-Marshall (1908–1992) English novelist, essayist, critic, memoirist and biographer

Calder-Marshall, Arthur. At Sea. London: Jonathan Cape. 1934.

Men, Happiness, Children, Smile

“Before us, art relied on memory, an anxious re-evocation of an Object lost (happiness, love, a landscape), and hence was nostalgic, static, charged with suffering and distance. With Futurism, instead, art is turning into art-action, which is to say, into will, optimism, aggression, possession, penetration, delight, brutal reality within art (example: onomatopoiea; —example: noise-tuners = motors), geometrical splendor of forces, projections forward. Thus, art is becoming Presence, new Object, new reality created with the abstract elements of the universe. The hands of the passéist artist used to suffer for the sake of the lost Object; our hand will twitch for the new Object to be created. That is why the new Object (the plastic complex) has miraculously appeared in your hands.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

Quote in: Fortunato Depero & Giacomo Balla 'The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe' in: Direzione del Movimento Futurista, March 11, 1915. Transl. Caroline Tisdall, 1973.
1910's

Love, Happiness, Art, Optimism

“I believe that there are varying points of contact. You have to be able to see the whole thing first. All great paintings are sculptures – there's so much of the factualness about it that a great painting forces you into a visual, physical movement of yourself. That's what determines the way you experience a painting kinetically. You move closer, you sight down it, you till your head, you step back, you feel as though you are in it. That being in it is just as important as looking from a distance.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Kenneth Noland, p. 10
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Way, Feeling, Painting

“Twenty kilometers. At an average speed of 120 klicks per hour, we should cover the distance in ten minutes. Ten freezing, adrenaline-pumping, gorge-rising, terror-beating-against-the-ribs, react-in-a-microsecond-or-die seconds.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 15 (p. 297)

Speed

“In any case the road to success is pictured as one beset with perils but which, it would seem, an individual with the proper qualities can overcome to attain the goal. The reward is seen in the distance; the way is lonely. Further on it is a route for wolves; one can succeed only at the cost of the failure of others.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Way, Failure, Success

“They say there is a young lady in [New Haven] who is beloved of that Great Being, who made and rules the world, and that there are certain seasons in which this Great Being, in some way or other invisible, comes to her and fills her mind with exceeding sweet delight; and that she hardly cares for any thing, except to meditate on him— that she expects after a while to be received up where he is, to be raised up out of the world and caught up into heaven; being assured that he loves her too well to let her remain at a distance from him always. There she is to dwell with him, and to be ravished with his love and delight for ever. Therefore, if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards it and cares not for it, and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strange sweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections; is most just and conscientious in all her conduct; and you could not persuade her to do any thing wrong or sinful, if you would give her all the world, lest she should offend this Great Being. She is of a wonderful sweetness, calmness, and universal benevolence of mind; especially after this Great God has manifested himself to her mind. She will sometimes go about from place to place, singing sweetly; and seems to be always full of joy and pleasure; and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisible always conversing with her.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Written in 1723; from The Works of President Edwards, vol. I, ed. Sereno B. Dwight, 1830.
The young woman described here was Sarah Pierrepont, who became Edwards' wife in 1727.

Love, God, Pain, Pleasure

“It takes a little more time to get into the role, but not very much more. In making a record you don't have the sense of projection over a distance as in an opera house. We have this microphone and this magnifies all details of a performance, all exaggerations. In the theater, you can get away with a very large, very grand phrase. For the microphone, you have to tone it down. It's the same as making a film, your gestures will be seen in close-up, so they cannot be exaggerated as they would be in a theater.”

Maria Callas (1923–1977) American-born Greek operatic soprano

On making studio recordings
Callas : The Art and the Life (1974)

Sense, Time, Housing

“Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance
Everybody thinks its true.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Train In The Distance
Song lyrics, Hearts and Bones (1983)

Love, Thinking, Training

“Whoever killed "Muaahadan" a confederate (a term used in Islamic state to refer to non-Muslim citizens), will not smell Paradise. And its scent can be smelled from a distance of forty years”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

a term in Arabic means "far distance"
Narrated By An-Nasaie [citation needed]
Sunni Hadith

“I had looked forward
to old age as a time
of quietness, a time to draw
my horizons about me,
to watch memories ripening
in the sunlight of a walled garden.
But there is the void
over my head and the distance
within that the tireless signals
come from. And astronaut
on impossible journeys
to the far side of the self
I return with messages
I cannot decipher.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"The New Mariner", p. 99
Between Here and Now (1981)

Age, Memory, Time, Drawing

“It is possible to regulate watercourses over any given distance without embankment works; to transport timber and other materials, even when heavier than water, for example ore, stones, etc., down the centre of such water-courses; to raise the height of the water table in the surrounding countryside and to endow the water with all those elements necessary for the prevailing vegetation. Furthermore it is possible in this way to render timber and other such materials non-inflammable and rot resistant; to produce drinking and spa-water for man, beast and soil of any desired composition and performance artificially, but in the way that it occurs in Nature; to raise water in a vertical pipe without pumping devices; to produce any amount of electricity and radiant energy almost without cost; to raise soil quality and to heal cancer, tuberculosis and a variety of nervous disorders… the practical implementation of this … would without doubt signify a complete reorientation in all areas of science and technology. By application of these new found laws, I have already constructed fairly large installations in the spheres of log-rafting and river regulation, which as is known, have functioned faultlessly for a decade, and which today still present insoluble enigmas to the various scientific disciplines concerned.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger: Our Senseless Toil (1934)

Law, Way, Drink, Nature

“Everything has altered its dimensions, except the world we live in. The more we know of that, the smaller it seems. Time and distance have been abridged, remote countries have become accessible, and the antipodes are upon visiting terms. There is a reunion of the human race; and the family resemblance now that we begin to think alike, dress alike, and live alike, is very striking. The South Sea Islanders, and the inhabitants of China, import their fashions from Paris, and their fabrics from Manchester, while Rome and London supply missionaries to the ‘ends of the earth,’ to bring its inhabitants into ‘one fold, under one Shepherd.’ Who shall write a book of travels now? Livingstone has exhausted the subject. What field is there left for a future Munchausen? The far West and the far East have shaken hands and pirouetted together, and it is a matter of indifference whether you go to the moors in Scotland to shoot grouse, to South America to ride and alligator, or to Indian jungles to shoot tigers-there are the same facilities for reaching all, and steam will take you to either with the equal ease and rapidity. We have already talked with New York; and as soon as our speaking-trumpet is mended shall converse again. ‘To waft a sigh from Indus to the pole,’ is no longer a poetic phrase, but a plain matter of fact of daily occurrence. Men breakfast at home, and go fifty miles to their counting-houses, and when their work is done, return to dinner. They don’t go from London to the seaside, by way of change, once a year; but they live on the coast, and go to the city daily. The grand tour of our forefathers consisted in visiting the principle cities of Europe. It was a great effort, occupied a vast deal of time, cost a large sum of money, and was oftener attended with danger than advantage. It comprised what was then called, the world: whoever had performed it was said to have ‘seen the world,’ and all that it contained. The Grand Tour now means a voyage round the globe, and he who has not made it has seen nothing.”

Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865) Canadian-British politician, judge, and author

The Season-Ticket, An Evening at Cork 1860 p. 1-2.

Men, Money, Books, World

“Ours, too, should be a declaration of difference and distance—"We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created unequal." In the wake of the old world, this will be our proposition.”

Richard Bertrand Spencer (1978) American white supremacist

Men, Truth, World

“That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off…and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 2 “The Hand of God 137” (p. 32).

Star, Idea, Light, Fight

“Toni: Mamá… MAMÁ! I'm paying peak long-distance rates here. Could you save the Hail Marys until we hang up?”

Alison Bechdel book Dykes to Watch Out For

#236, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1996), collected in Hot, Throbbing DTWOF (1997).
Dykes to Watch Out For

“The teams at times could go but a short distance every day. In bad weather at night there would be as many as 150 horses at one of the small frame inns which were not more than five or eight miles apart. Each driver had to care for his eight horses, feed, clean, card, harness and unharness. For all this work my father received the wages of $15 per month.”

Henry M. Leland (1843–1932) American businessman

Source: Master of Precision: Henry M. Leland, 1966, p. 20; Lelands father was farmer and drove an eight-horse wagon between Boston and Montreal. Leland gave a description of the working conditions of those drivers.

Time, Horse, Weather, Night

“.. whatever may have been the style and title, the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp, insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the robe of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes, but in the robe wholly of purple which was reckoned in antiquity as the proper regal attire, and received, sitting on his golden chair and without rising from it, the solemn procession of the senate. The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories, and of vows, filled the calendar. When Caesar came to the capital, his principal servants marched forth in trips to great distances so as to meet and escort him. To be near to him began to be of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city where he lived. Personal interviews with him were rendered so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience, that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the ante-chamber. People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself, that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen. There arose a monarchical aristocracy, which was a remarkable manner at once new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of the royalty, the nobility of the patriciate. The patrician body still subsisted, although without essential privileges as an order, in the character of a close aristocratic guild; but as it could receive no new gentes it had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries, and in Caesar's time there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician gentes still in existence. Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right of creating new patrician gentes conferred on the Imperator by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate, which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchichal aristocracy - the charm of antiquity, entire dependence on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides the new sovereignty revealed itself.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Part 2. Translated by W.P. Dickson.
The New Court.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

People, Communication, Idea, Birthday

“Australia's distance from Europe was probably only tolerable because it had strategic commodities which England, threatened by changing European alliances, might some day be unable to produce in the northern hemisphere. Flax was the first conqueror - a hollow conqueror - of the distance which so often shaped Australia's destiny.”

Geoffrey Blainey book The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History

The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History (1966)

Change

“I would make the profession of every man, the rule by which to fashion his crest or coat of arms!… To the petifogger (sic), three links of a convict's chain, with the Penitentiary in the distance! To the Bank Director a Widow's Coffin, with a weeping Orphan on either side by way of heraldic supporters! Pah! There is no single word of contempt in the whole language, too bitter, to express my opinion of this magnificent Pretension - the Aristocracy of the Quaker City!”

George Lippard (1822–1854) Novelist, journalist

The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall, part 2, chapter 4 "Dora Livingstone at Home" (1844)

Way, Fashion, Support

“The photographer’s gesture as the search for a viewpoint onto a scene takes place within the possibilities offered by the apparatus. The photographer moves within specific categories of space and time regarding the scene: proximity and distance, bird- and worm’s-eye views, frontal- and side-views, short or long exposures, etc. The Gestalt of space–time surrounding the scene is prefigured for the photographer by the categories of his camera. These categories are an a priori for him. He must ‘decide’ within them: he must press the trigger.”

Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) Czech philosopher and photographer

Flusser, Vilém (2012) [1980], "Towards a Theory of Techno-Imagination", Philosophy of Photography (POP) 2 (2), p. 198.

Search, Bird, Time

“They have lost the metaphysical sense
Of the future, they feel themselves
The end of a chain
Of lives, single lives
And we know that lives
Are single
And cannot defend
The metaphysic
On which rest
The boundaries
Of our distances.”

George Oppen (1908–1984) American poet

from "Of Being Numerous" #26, 1968; New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, ISBN 0-811-21488-5

Feeling, Sense, Future

“The longer a line, the more of the time element it contains. Distance is time whereas a surface is apprehended more in terms of the moment.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Exact Experiments in the Realm of Art (1927)
1921 - 1930

Time

“What looks large from a distance, close up ain't never that big.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Empire Burlesque (1985), Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)

“Some time ago I saw a painting by Thijs Maris [= Matthijs Maris, one of the three brothers Maris, all three famous Dutch impressionist painters of the Hague School ] that reminded me of it. An old Dutch town with rows of brownish red houses with step-gables and tall flights of steps, grey roofs, and white or yellow doors, window-frames and cornices; canals with ships and a large white drawbridge, a barge with a man at the tiller going under it... Some distance away a stone bridge over the canal, with people and a cart with white horses crossing it. And everywhere movement, a porter with his wheelbarrow, a man leaning against the railing, gazing into the water, women in black with white caps... A greyish white sky over everything…”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

quote from Vincent's Letter #031 to Theo van Gogh (London, 6 April 1875) http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let031/letter.html 1870s

Women, People, School, Water

“Once again fear, and mystery, swept over me…I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical…”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Fear, Home

“The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1973) Image and Environment. p. ix
1970s

Science

“If so, her motion must be influenced by it; perhaps she is retained in her orbit thereby. However, though the power of gravity is not sensibly weakened in the little change of distance, at which we can place ourselves from the centre of the earth, yet it is very possible that, so high as the moon, this power may differ much in strength from what it is here. To make an estimate what might be the degree of this diminution, he considered with himself that, if the moon be retained in her orbit by the force of gravity, no doubt the primary planets are carried round the sun by the like power. And, by comparing the periods of the several planets with their distances from the sun, he found that if any power like gravity held them in their courses, its strength must decrease in the duplicate proportion of the increase of distance. This he concluded by supposing them to move in perfect circles concentrical to the sun, from which the orbits of the greatest part of them do not much differ. Supposing therefore the power of gravity, when extended to the moon, to decrease in the same manner, he computed whether that force would be sufficient to keep the moon in her orbit. In this computation, being absent from books, he took the common estimate, in use among geographers and our seamen before Norwood had measured the earth, that 60 English miles were contained in one degree of latitude on the surface of the earth. But as this is a very faulty supposition, each degree containing about 691/2 of our miles, his computation did not answer expectation; whence he concluded, that some other cause must at least join with the action of the power of gravity on the moon. On this account he laid aside, for that time, any farther thoughts upon this matter.”

Henry Pemberton (1694–1771) British doctor

Republished in: Stephen Peter Rigaud (1838) Historical Essay on the First Publication of Sir Newton's Principia http://books.google.com/books?id=uvMGAAAAcAAJ&pg=RA1-PA49. p. 50-51 Preface to View of Newton's Philosophy, (1728)

Books, Change, Time, Sun

“As is known, scientific physics dates its existence from the discovery of the differential calculus. Only when it was learned how to follow continuously the course of natural events, attempts, to construct by means of abstract conceptions the connection between phenomena, met with success. To do this two things are necessary: First, simple fundamental concepts with which to construct; second, some method by which to deduce, from the simple fundamental laws of the construction which relate to instants of time and points in space, laws for finite intervals and distances, which alone are accessible to observation”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

can be compared with experience Die partiellen Differentialgleichungen der mathematischen Physik (1882) as quoted by Robert Édouard Moritz, Memorabilia Mathematica; Or, The Philomath's Quotation-book https://books.google.com/books?id=G0wtAAAAYAAJ (1914) p. 239

Law, Nature, Learning, Time

“I have frequently had men describe the following scenario to me: "If at the beginning of a relationship, I keep the woman at a distance and don't want to get too close, she feels that I am pushing her away and that I am not making a commitment—that I am afraid to be intimate. When I finally let down my guard and try to be intimate and close, when I really make myself vulnerable and give up control, which is uncomfortable for me, then I feel really inadequate. She blames me for things that she never blamed me for when I kept my distance. When I start to get close, that's when I am accused of saying the wrong thing or trying to control her. So I am better off staying at a distance and letting her complain about a lack of intimacy."Stewart, age thirty-six, described it this way: "Maryann was liberated on the surface, but the undertow was very different. I would find out a couple of evenings after I had been with her that she was very angry and I wouldn't even know that I had done something wrong. She would be angry because she said I wasn't really involved enough. I didn't care enough about her. The irony is that the women in my life whom I've made the greatest effort to get close to are the ones who always wind up saying they are angry because I wasn't getting close. When I made no effort to get close and really kept my distance, I never got any complaints. The moment I felt I was really opening myself up to be intimate, that was when I was found to be failing. That is the double bind for me."Another such truth was experienced by Alex. He said, "If you keep the control, the distance, then the woman is kept insecure; and so long as she is insecure about the relationship, she will be less inclined to attack. If she's interested in you, but you keep her at a distance, she will be careful about attacking you. She won't criticize you because she's afraid of you. The moment you cross the barrier and actually start to get committed, you find that she begins to feel that you are inadequate as a partner. You know then and there that you are never going to be able to satisfy her."I found this to be true sexually. At the times when I personally thought I was the most sensitive and the most involved and caring as a lover, I would find out often that I was a failure. At the times when I allowed myself to be totally selfish, without apology and didn't give one thought to what the woman experienced, I never got any complaints. I was never told I was selfish as a lover. In fact, I was often told that I was wonderful."”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

Why men and women can't talk to each other: the hidden unconscious messages of gender, pp. 39–40
The Inner Male (1987)

Life, Women, Men, Truth

“Zoe slowed but didn’t stop. She kept her hands in front of her, still a judicious distance from the animal.
But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 15 (p. 140)

Life, Birth, Light, Animals

“NETWORK — Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.”

Samuel Johnson book A Dictionary of the English Language

A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

“If you are afraid of changes
Watch from a distance
Whether or not I might do something
If you're going to talk about me behind my back
It is what it is.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Alterna
Lyrics, (Miss)Understood

Change

“You are the strongest and the others keep their distance. It is no longer necessary to win victories over them.”

Taisen Deshimaru (1914–1982) Japanese Buddhist monk

As quoted in A Galaxy Not So Far Away : Writers and Artists on Twenty-five Years of Star Wars (2002) by Glenn Kenny, p. 99

Victory

“He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered in exile, looking for a way of killing her with his own death.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 148, referring to Aureliano José

Death, War, Way, Suffering

“Mr President," I said, " I have to tell you something. I don't want to get too close to you." He looked startled. I imagine it was a rare thing for a U. S. Commander-in-chief to hear. "Canada is your best friend, largest trading partner, and closest ally, but we are also an independent country. Keeping some distance will be good for both of us. If we look as though we're the fifty-first state of the United States, there is nothing we can do for you internationally, just as the governor of a state can't do anything for you internationally. But if we look independent enough, we can do things for you that even the CIA cannot do.”

Jean Chrétien (1934) 20th Prime Minister of Canada

Source: My Years As Prime Minister (2007), Chapter Three, Yankee Traders, p. 87

Imagination, Country

“Men and things rise, fall, move away, approach. Everything is a comedy of distances.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Hombres y cosas, suben, bajan, se alejan, se acercan. Todo es una comedia de distancias.
Voces (1943)

Men

“When the war is over, in the world's social revolution that will be followed by a more equitable distribution of the earth's riches, due account must be kept of the sacrifices and of the discipline maintained by the Italian workers. The Fascist revolution will make another decisive step to shorten social distances.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Mussolini’s speech in Rome, Italy, February 23, 1941. Published in the New York Times, February 24, 1941.
1940s

War, World, Decision

“Let the universe have only two dimensions, and let it be the surface of an india rubber ball. It is only the surface that is the universe, not the ball itself. …Let there be specks of dust fixed to the surface to represent the different galactic systems. If the ball is inflated, the universe expands, and these specks of dust will recede from each other, their mutual distances, measured along the surface, will increase in the same rate as the radius of the ball. An observer in any one of the specks will see all the others receding from himself, but it does not follow that he is the centre of the universe. The universe (which is the surface of the ball, not the ball itself) has no centre.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932)

Universe

“—On the dedication page of the rebellion, we see the words “To Clementine”. A fine sentiment, miscellaneous organ music next, and, turning several pages, massed orange flags at the head of the column. This will not be easy, but neither will it be hard. Good will is everywhere, and the lighthearted song of the gondoliers is heard in the distance.
—Yes, success is everything. Morally important as well as useful in a practical way.
—What have the rebels captured thus far? One zoo, not our best zoo, and a cemetery. The rebels have entered the cages of the tamer animals and are playing with them, gently.
—Things can get better, and in my opinion will.
—Their Graves Registration procedures are scrupulous—accurate and fair.
—There’s more to it than playing guitars and clapping along. Although that frequently gets people in the mood.
—Their methods are direct, not subtle. Dissolution, leaching, sandblasting, cracking and melting of fireproof doors, condemnation, water damage, slide presentations, clamps and buckles.
—And skepticism, although absolutely necessary, leads to not very much.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“The Crisis”, opening
Great Days (1979)

People, Music, Way, Mood

“These… are the two observational facts about our neighbourhood, which have to be accounted for by the theory: there is a finite density of matter, and there is expansion, i. e. the mutual distances are increasing, and therefore the density is decreasing.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

“Non-local influences do not diminish with distance. They are as potent at a million miles as at a millimeter.
Non-local influences act instantaneously. The speed of their transmission is not limited by the velocity of light.
A non-local interaction links up one location with another without crossing space, without decay, and without delay. A non-local interaction is, in short, unmediated, unmitigated, and immediate.”

Nick Herbert (1936) American physicist

Source: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 12, Bell's Interconnectedness Theorem, p. 214

Light, Speed

“Family trips of my childhood always began with a prayer. I suppose when one goes on vacation, one is courting death in some fashion, tying the morgue tags onto one’s suitcase. But then, too, vacations are respites from death, from thoughts of death. I have sometimes wondered why friends under medical death sentences have undertaken arduous trips or undertaken arduous labors. To put some distance between themselves and death—the obvious answer.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Death, Family, Fashion, Childhood

“The question we must all ask ourselves is how Mr. Benn was able to come within striking distance of the very heart of our economic life in the first place… an important part of the answer must be that our industry, economic life and society have been so debilitated by 30 years of Socialistic fashions that their very weakness tempts further inroads. The path to Benn is paved with 30 years of interventions: 30 years of good intentions: 30 years of disappointments. These have led the collectivists to say that we are failing only because we are taking half measures. The reality is that for 30 years the private sector of our economy has been forced to work with one hand tied behind its back by government and unions. Socialist measures and Socialist legacies have weakened free enterprise.”

Keith Joseph (1918–1994) British barrister and politician

Speech in Upminster http://www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/displaydocument.asp?docid=110604 (22 June 1974) 1970s

Life, Disappointment, Fashion, Question

“… We talked while the full moon mounted in the sky, words filling up the narrow space between us, as much a buffer as a link. Hours passed and then suddenly at my foot there was a wriggle of the soil. A kangaroo mouse emerged, a creature that I have never otherwise seen except fleeing at a distance. I put my hand on the man’s shoulder to call his attention to this surprise, and we fell silent and watched the strangely fearless mouse do its work for a long time, then resumed the conversation more slowly and more softly as the creature continued to refine its tunnel entrance and the mound of gravelly earth at its mouth, indifferent to our presence. Bats swooped down and snatched invisible meals from the air, and coyotes began to howl, more of them, closer and more persistently than I’ve ever heard before or since, a whole orchestra of drawn-out cries into the dawn.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

Time, Indifference

“[The loss- of-strength gradient is] the degree to which military and political power diminishes as we move a unit distance away from its home base.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

According to Marike Finlay (1987) Powermatics: A Discursive Critique of New Technology. p. 200 with this statement "Kenneth Boulding has shown, the extent of control is a function of loss-of-strength gradient of a political centre."
Source: 1960s, Conflict and defense: A general theory, 1962, p. 245

Home, Loss

“The weather today is frightful, rain and wind. You must be having the same at Epping; it's a pity. It had been so fine for the last few days and I had begun to grind away from nature. This is infuriating, for it's the loveliest time of the year, September and October. I can't stand the summer any more, with its heavy, monotonous green, its dry distances where everything can be seen, the torment of the great heat... Artistic sensations revive in September and October, but then it rains and blows!”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

In a letter to his son Lucien, 15 September 1893, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock - , Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 148
1890's

Nature, Time, Summer, Weather

“That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.”

Richard Russo book Straight Man

Epilogue.
Straight Man (1997)

Truth, Fear, Understanding, Personality

“A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.”

Graham Greene (1904–1991) English writer, playwright and literary critic

Letter to critic Stephen Pile, Sunday Times (London) (January 18, 1981)

Truth

“Sweetest melodies
Are those that are by distance made more sweet.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Personal Talk, Stanza 2.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“In fact, the state rights defense of secession in 1860–1861 did not really appear in force until after 1865 as builders of the Lost Cause myth sought to distance themselves from slavery.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (1996), p. 180

Appearance

“We have also sound houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise divers trembling and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear to do further the hearing greatly. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as if it were tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in tubes and pipes, in strange lines and distances…”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

New Atlantis http://www.constitution.org/bacon/new_atlantis.htm (1627)

Music, Bird, Time, Help

“And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!"”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
"The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic), lines 22-33

History

“If the moon and earth were not retained in their orbits by their animal force or some other equivalent, the earth would mount to the moon by a fifty-fourth part of their distance, and the moon fall towards the earth through the other fifty-three parts, and they would there meet, assuming, however, that the substance of both is of the same density.”

Johannes Kepler book Astronomia nova

As quoted by Bryant, ibid.
Astronomia nova (1609)

Animals, Parting

“Sight, when used in the context of nature, creates direct communication with reality. It implies that one is involved in this particular reality and quickly leads a person to action. But when the image has become artificial and is purely a means of knowledge, the reaction persists. I feel directly involved in what I see, just as prehistoric people did. And if I am seeing objects or ideas, I am not truly independent; I cannot really take my distance from these objects. From the intellectual point of view, this means I cannot really exercise my critical faculties. The use of images to transmit knowledge leads to the progressive elimination of distance between a person and his knowledge, because of the way we are made to participate when this means is used (this is, of course, in perfect accord with technical civilization, and to be desired by its standards). The critical faculties and autonomy of the thinking person are also eliminated.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 212
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People, Way, Feeling, Exercises

“Let us imagine that from any given point the system of shortest lines going out from it is constructed; the position of an arbitrary point may then be determined by the initial direction of the geodesic in which it lies, and by its distance measured along that line from the origin. It can therefore be expressed in terms of the ratios dx0 of the quantities dx in this geodesic, and of the length s of this line. …the square of the line-element is \sum (dx)^2 for infinitesimal values of the x, but the term of next order in it is equal to a homogeneous function of the second order… an infinitesimal, therefore, of the fourth order; so that we obtain a finite quantity on dividing this by the square of the infinitesimal triangle, whose vertices are (0,0,0,…), (x1, x2, x3,…), (dx1, dx2, dx3,…). This quantity retains the same value so long as… the two geodesics from 0 to x and from 0 to dx remain in the same surface-element; it depends therefore only on place and direction. It is obviously zero when the manifold represented is flat, i. e., when the squared line-element is reducible to \sum (dx)^2, and may therefore be regarded as the measure of the deviation of the manifoldness from flatness at the given point in the given surface-direction. Multiplied by -¾ it becomes equal to the quantity which Privy Councillor Gauss has called the total curvature of a surface. …The measure-relations of a manifoldness in which the line-element is the square root of a quadric differential may be expressed in a manner wholly independent of the choice of independent variables. A method entirely similar may for this purpose be applied also to the manifoldness in which the line-element has a less simple expression, e. g., the fourth root of a quartic differential. In this case the line-element, generally speaking, is no longer reducible to the form of the square root of a sum of squares, and therefore the deviation from flatness in the squared line-element is an infinitesimal of the second order, while in those manifoldnesses it was of the fourth order. This property of the last-named continua may thus be called flatness of the smallest parts. The most important property of these continua for our present purpose, for whose sake alone they are here investigated, is that the relations of the twofold ones may be geometrically represented by surfaces, and of the morefold ones may be reduced to those of the surfaces included in them…”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)

Imagination, Parting, Dependency

“The standard SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) theory of strong, electromagnetic, and weak interactions appears to correctly describe physics down to the smallest distance scales yet probed.”

Leonard Susskind (1940) American physicist

[1984, The gauge hierarchy problem, technicolor, supersymmetry, and all that, Physics Reports, 104, 2–4, 181–193, 10.1016/0370-1573(84)90208-4]

Strong, Appearance

“The last decade has seen many of the gains of the early years of democracy reversed through state capture and corruption, a failure of collective leadership, policy uncertainty and a growing distance between the people and their movement and their government. We have had to come to terms with the erosion of the values of the ANC and confront difficult questions about the quality and integrity of our leadership as the ANC.”

Cyril Ramaphosa (1952) 5th President of South Africa

At a memorial lecture for the late struggle icon Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in Johannesburg, as quoted by Siviwe Feketha in Ramaphosa slams Zuma's tenure, calls on ANC to tackle divisions https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/politics/ramaphosa-slams-zumas-tenure-calls-on-anc-to-tackle-divisions/ar-BBNMdMN, IOL (30 September 2018)

People, Democracy, Failure, Question

“I had not thought of this regular decrease of gravity, namely that it is as the inverse square of the distance; this is a new and highly remarkable property of gravity.”

Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher

(1691) quoted in Popular Astronomy, Vol. 56 (1948), pp. 189–190.

“The core study of geography is the study of places, that is the analysis of the significant differences that distinguish the various areas of the world from each other. Among the differences that are significant to this areal differentiation, one of the more obvious are differences in landforms; one of the least obvious to the eye, but nonetheless important in molding the character of areas, are the differences in their political organization. In pursuing these and other separate topics, geographers "radiate out in diverse directions" "and for various distances, toward the cores of other disciplines."”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

As long as they realise where they are in reference to the central core, they may hope to understand each other purposes.
R. Hartshorne (1950) "The functional approach in political geography," Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 40 (2), p. 95

World, Hope, Understanding, Study

“Obama’s manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness—the middle distance—that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Staël’s meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer’s porcupines, who shift restlessly from getting cold at a distance to prickling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic—and seemed so as much then as now—in a characteristically American way…. Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders…. Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a sense, the first American elite president—that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite—since John Kennedy …. Obama's mixed race, his apparent and assumed blackness, his non-elite class origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences—all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185-6
On Barack Obama

Money, People, Secret, World

“Kuhn had the genius to find the words and sketch the concepts that made important old philosophical problems relevant to the public and newly discussable by philosophers. He had the strength of mind and commitment to lead the discussion. He could speak the truly incommensurable languages of physics, philosophy, and history, all necessary to frame and advance his epistemological quest. He wrote, as one of his admirers, Margaret Masterman, put it, in a "quasi-poetic style," sometimes veiled, sometimes with "rhetorical exaggeration," but always after careful and even painful thought. Or, to switch metaphors, he drew the portrait of science in the manner of the Impressionists. At a distance, where most viewers stand, the portrait appears illuminating, persuasive, and inspiring; close in, where historians and philosophers stare, it looks sketchy, puzzling, and richly challenging.”

John L. Heilbron (1934) American historian

Thomas Samuel Kuhn: 18 July 1922-17 June 1996 (1998)

Pain, History, Problem, Appearance

“One of the many importants ideas introduced by Minkowski into the study of convex bodies was that of gauge function. Roughly, the gauge function is the equation of a convex body. Minkowski showed that the gauge function could be defined in a purely geometric way and that it must have certain properties analogous to those possessed by the distance of a point from the origin. He also showed that conversely given any function possessing these properties, there exists a convex body with the given function as its gauge function.”

Carl Ludwig Siegel (1896–1981) German mathematician

[Lectures on the Geometry of Numbers, https://books.google.com/books?id=dyH4CAAAQBAJ&pg=PA6] (p. 6)

Way, Idea, Gauge, Study

“If I had my time again, I think maybe I'd try to be a cook. I love food and am endlessly interested in recipes, weirdly enough. But now, the occupation of "cat" would probably be nearer the mark. Sleeping. Gazing into the middle distance. Occasionally making rapid movements for no real reason. I could do that.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Associated Content Interview (October 23, 2006)

Love, Food, Cats, Thinking

“When they’d gone the old man turned around to watch the sun’s slow descent. The Boat of Millions of Years, he thought; the boat of the dying sungod Ra, tacking down the western sky to the source of the dark river that runs through the underworld from west to east, through the twelve hours of the night, at the far eastern end of which the boat will tomorrow reappear, bearing a once again youthful, newly reignited sun.
Or, he thought bitterly, removed from us by a distance the universe shouldn’t even be able to encompass, it’s a vast motionless globe of burning gas, around which this little ball of a planet rolls like a pellet of dung propelled by a kephera beetle. Take your pick, he told himself as he started slowly down the hill…But be willing to die for your choice.”

Tim Powers book The Anubis Gates

Source: The Anubis Gates (1983), Chapter 1 (pp. 3-4)

Youth, Universe, Sun, Night

“Since it is hardly likely that contemporary critics seriously mean to bar prose narratives that are unrealistic from the domain of literature, one suspects that a special standard is being applied to sexual themes. … There is nothing conclusive in the well-known fact that most men and women fall short of the sexual prowess that people in pornography are represented as enjoying; that the size of organs, number and duration of orgasms, variety and feasibility of sexual powers, and amount of sexual energy all seem grossly exaggerated. Yes, and the spaceships and the teeming planets depicted in science-fiction novels don’t exist either. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography or science-fiction from being literature. … The materials of the pornographic books that count as literature are, precisely, one of the extreme forms of human consciousness. Undoubtedly, many people would agree that the sexually obsessed consciousness can, in principle, enter into literature as an art form. … But then they usually add a rider to the agreement which effectively nullifies it. They require that the author have the proper “distance” from his obsessions for their rendering to count as literature. Such a standard is sheer hypocrisy, revealing one again that the values commonly applied to pornography are, in the end, those belonging to psychiatry and social affairs rather than to art. (Since Christianity upped that ante and concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been a “special case” in our culture, evoking particularly inconsistent attitudes.) Van Gogh’s paintings retain their status as art even if it seems his manner of painting owed less to a conscious choice of representational means than to his being deranged and actually seeing reality the way he painted it. … What makes a work of pornography part of the history of art rather than of trash is not distance, the superimposition of a consciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon the “deranged consciousness” of the erotically obsessed. Rather, it is the originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged consciousness itself, as incarnated in a work.”

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

“The Pornographic Imagination,” pp. 45-47
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

Women, Men, People, Books

“I would rather not be called "Yang Berhormat" as long as I get to travel business class. It's not about being ashamed, but on long-distance travel, economy class can be quite tiring.”

Ibrahim Ali (1957) Member of the Dewan Rakyat (parliament)

Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things [Vol II]

Travel, Business

“Even though homosexuality does not distance oneself from Islam, the Islam does not encourage individuals who have same-sex attraction to show their feelings in public.”

Salman al-Ouda (1956) journalist

Reported by Eilaph on 30 April 2016, citing an interview in a Swedish newspaper. http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Saudi-cleric-Homosexuality-not-a-deviation-from-Islam-should-not-be-punished-452957 2016

Sex, Feeling

“He knew her too well to see her from the distance that pity requires. He loved her because he admired her. For bearing without complaint the burden the queen put on her. For still being gentle and loving when she had ample reason to be bitter.”

Orson Scott Card Hart's Hope

Hart's Hope (1983)

Love

“What? Men dodging this way for single bullets? What will you do when they open fire along the whole line? I am ashamed of you. They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance.”

John Sedgwick (1813–1864) Union Army general

Allegedly these were among General John Sedgwick's final words. He was serving as a Union commander in the American Civil War, and was hit by a sharpshooter's fire a few minutes after saying them, at the battle of Spotsylvania to his men who were ducking for cover, on May 9, 1864. The words have often been portrayed as if they were absolutely his last statement, with the sentence being presented as if he did not even finish it, and altered into the form: "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist..." . Though it may be a slightly more striking version of events, it is unlikely to be true. Civil War Home site: eye-witness account http://www.civilwarhome.com/sedgwickdeath.htm

Men, Way

“During my nine days' stay at Dacca, I visited most of the riot-affected areas of the city and suburbs. … The news of the killing of hundreds of innocent Hindus in trains, on railway lines between Dacca and Narayanganj, and Dacca and Chittagong gave me the rudest shock. … I reached Barisal town and was astounded to know of the happenings in Barisal. In the District town, a number of Hindu houses were burnt and a large number of Hindus killed. I visited almost all riot-affected areas in the District. … At the Madhabpasha Zamindar's house, about 200 people were killed and 40 injured. A place, called Muladi, witnessed a dreadful hell. At Muladi Bandar alone, the number killed would total more than three hundred, as was reported to me by the local Muslims including some officers. I visited Muladi village also, where I found skeletons of dead bodies at some places. I found dogs and vultures eating corpses on he river-side. I got the information there that after the whole-scale killing of all adult males, all the young girls were distributed among the ringleaders of the miscreants. At a place called Kaibartakhali under P. S. Rajapur, 63 persons were killed. Hindu houses within a stone's throw distance from the said thana office were looted, burnt and inmates killed. All Hindu shops of Babuganj Bazar were looted and then burnt and a large number of Hindus were killed. From detailed information received, the conservative estimate of casualties was placed at 2,500 killed in the District of Barisal alone. Total casualties of Dacca and East Bengal riot were estimated to be in the neighbourhood of 10,000 killed. The lamentation of women and children who had lost their all including near and dear ones melted my heart. I only asked myself "What was coming to Pakistan in the name of Islam."”

Jogendra Nath Mandal (1904–1968) Pakistani politician

Excerpted from the resignation letter of J. N. Mandal, Minister for Law and Labour, Government of Pakistan, October 8, 1950. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Resignation_letter_of_Jogendra_Nath_Mandal https://biblio.wiki/wiki/Resignation_letter_of_Jogendra_Nath_Mandal

Women, Children, People, Dogs

“I had seen him [Mahatama Gandhi] from a distance This was going to be the first personal contact. As I ascended the stairs of Manibahavan…I was feeling the thrill of anticipation of a great event. I entered the room and the awe which the scene inside inspired in my heart has not been erased from my memory. I sat in front of the Mahatma…After a while Gandhiji turned to me and asked me about the work that I was doing…He then inquired about my situation. Would I have to face any difficulties if I came away to join the movement? I reflected for a few fleeting moments. I asked myself…How can an army like this function if every soldier who is recruited has to place his personal difficulties before the General. I replied to him that I had no problems for his consideration. Then an interesting conversation followed. Lala Lajpat Rai took up the thread and asked Gandhiji to permit me to proceed to the Punjab, the place of my origin and join him, in the work of the movement there. Thereafter Shankarlal Banker put forward the argument that since my political birth was in Bombay I should stick to this place. The Mahatma gave his verdict in favour of Bombay and thus the interview ended. I found that Bunker was the key figure in the organization in Bombay then and a number of activities were being carried out under his personal direction.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

In, p. 5-6
Gulzarilal Nanda: A Life in the Service of the People

Feeling, Birth, Problem, Memory

“Ideology critique raises a claim that it shares with hermeneutics, namely, the claim to understand an “author” better than he understands himself. What at first sounds arrogant about this claim can be methodologically justified. Others often really do perceive things about me that escape my attention—and conversely. They possess the advantage of distance, which I can profit from only retrospectively through dialogic mirroring. This, of course, would presuppose a functioning dialogue, which is precisely what does not take place in the process of ideology critique.
An ideology critique that does not clearly accept its identity as satire can, however, easily be transformed from an instrument in the search for truth into one of dogmatism. All too often, it interferes with the capacity for dialogue instead of opening up new paths for it.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 19

Truth, Search, Understanding

“Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers, and the greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance themselves from or draw near to this mystery.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (cited in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/deleuze.htm#SH3b) A - F, Gilles Deleuze

Christ, Drawing

“Near me, nothing but distances.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Cerca de mí no hay más que lejanías.
Voces (1943)

“This contest has lasted now for more than four years. Were its scene at a distance from our neighborhood, we might be indifferent to its result, although humanity could not be unmoved by many of its incidents wherever they might occur. It is, however, at our door.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1870s, Fourth State of the Union Address (1872)

Indifference

“Emily stared into the middle distance, trying to ignore the fact that the men were looking at her like a cupcake on a plate.”

M. K. Hobson book The Native Star

Source: The Native Star (2010), Chapter 23, “The Skycladdische and the Sangrimancer” (p. 325)

Men

“If we study Japanese art, you see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismarck? No. He studies a single blade of grass..”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in Vincent's letter to brother Theo, from Arles, Sept. 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 542), p. 39 1880s, 1888

Art, Intelligence, Study, Grass

“Every now and then its good to step back a little. When we let go a little and remove ourselves from the drama, we can see more clearly. So often we are caught up in the stress we fail to see what triggers our worries. When we are still and put distance between our problems we often discover the solutions”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All Will be Well (2004)

Problem

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume I; lecture 1, "Atoms in Motion"; section 1-2, "Matter is made of atoms"; p. 1-2
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

World, Imagination, Knowledge, Thinking

“I would like to address the peoples of the world, especially the Arab peoples and the US people. Their silence over the violations against the oppressed Iraqi people who suffered greatly cannot be accepted by any fair-minded and zealous person. Therefore, all must take these violations seriously and express themselves even through peaceful demonstrations, sit-ins and protests. I urge those people to distance themselves from their rulers who support the West and the occupation forces.”

Muqtada Sadr (1973) Iraqi politician

Source: BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3623603.stm

People, World, Peace, Support

“Freedom from the world is, in principle, not asceticism, but rather a distance from the world for which all participation in things worldly takes place in the attitude of “as if not.””

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884–1976) German theologian

1 Cor. 7:29-31 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+7%3A29-31&version=KJV Source: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1941), p. 18

World, Freedom

“[T]he astronomical data give the number N of nebulae counted out to a given inferred "distance" d, and in order to determine the curvature… we must express N, or equivalently V, to which it is assumed proportional, in terms of d. …from the second of formulae (3) and… (4)… to the approximation here adopted, 5)V = \frac{4}{3} \pi d^2 (1 + \frac{3}{10} K d^2 + …);…plotting N against… d and comparing… with the formula (5), it should be possible operationally to determine the "curvature" K.”

Howard P. Robertson (1903–1961) American mathematician and physicist

Geometry as a Branch of Physics (1949)

“Age, like distance, lends a double charm.”

Oliver Herford (1863–1935) American writer

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Urania: A Rhymed Lesson (1846), p. 11.
Misattributed

Age

“Anarcharsis, on learning that the sides of a ship were four fingers thick, said that "the passengers were just that distance from death."”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Anarcharsis, 5.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 2: Socrates, his predecessors and followers

Death, Learning

“I have read your pleasant letter of 14th with singular pleasure. I discern your kind inclination and affection which I feel deeply obliged to requite [you] with service and friendship. Because of [my] inclination to do this, [and] in spite of your wish (of Constantijn Huygens], [I] am sending [you] along [with this letter] a painting, hoping that you will accept it, because it is the first momento which I offer you, Sir.... postscripttum]: My [dear] Sir: hang this picture in a bright light and in such a manner that it can be viewed from a distance. It will then sparkle at its best.”

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch 17th century painter and etcher

1630 - 1640

Friendship, Pleasure, Hope, Feeling

“Hitherto we have considered the apparent motion of the star about its true place, as made only in a plane parallel to the ecliptic, in which case it appears to describe a circle in that plane; but since, when we judge of the place and motion of a star, we conceive it to be in the surface of a sphere, whose centre is our eye, 'twill be necessary to reduce the motion in that plane to what it would really appear on the surface of such a sphere, or (which will be equivalent) to what it would appear on a plane touching such a sphere in the star's true place. Now in the present case, where we conceive the eye at an indefinite distance, this will be done by letting fall perpendiculars from each point of the circle on such a plane, which from the nature of the orthographic projection will form an ellipsis, whose greater axis will be equal to the diameter of that circle, and the lesser axis to the greater as the sine of the star's latitude to the radius, for this latter plane being perpendicular to a line drawn from the centre of the sphere through the star's true place, which line is inclined to the ecliptic in an angle equal to the star's latitude; the touching plane will be inclined to the plane of the ecliptic in an angle equal to the complement of the latitude. But it is a known proposition in the orthographic projection of the sphere, that any circle inclined to the plane of the projection, to which lines drawn from the eye, supposed at an infinite distance, are at right angles, is projected into an ellipsis, having its longer axis equal to its diameter, and its shorter to twice the cosine of the inclination to the plane of the projection, half the longer axis or diameter being the radius.
Such an ellipse will be formed in our present case…”

James Bradley (1693–1762) English astronomer; Astronomer Royal

Miscellaneous Works and Correspondence (1832), Demonstration of the Rules relating to the Apparent Motion of the Fixed Stars upon account of the Motion of Light.

Star, Nature, Appearance

“How you deal with it I must and will leave to you, not out of despair or resignation but in deference to my conscience, that broken clock which I believe is now chiming one of its occasional right hours. I will not question your reasons. It is enough for you to tell me that you wish to keep this distance between us, and it will always be enough. Know that a single word will bring me running, but unless and until it pleases you to give it, I will expect nothing, force nothing, and contrive nothing contrary to your wishes.
I desire you as deeply as I ever have, but I understand that the fervor of a desire is irrelevant to its justice. I want your heart on merit, in mutual trust, or not at all, because I cannot bear to see you made uneasy by me. Not for all the world would I do so again, and I leave it to you to tell me how to proceed, if and when you can, if and when you will.”

Scott Lynch book The Republic of Thieves

Source: The Republic of Thieves (2013), Chapter 10 “The Five-Year Game: Final Approaches” section 11 (p. 605)

World, Justice, Understanding, Question

“A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I have noticed in myself and many others: as soon as it is written, every new book erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it. I thought I was writing books one after the other in a disjointed way, in successive bouts of oblivion, but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same phrases keep coming back in book after book, like patterns on a tapestry woven while half asleep. While half asleep or while daydreaming. A novelist is often a sleepwalker, so steeped is he in what he must write, and it is natural to worry when he crosses the road in case he is run over. Do not forget, though, the extreme precision of sleepwalkers who walk over roofs without ever falling off.”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

From Nobel Lecture (2014)

Books, Way, Nature, Success

“I don’t use the word 'pet.' I think it’s speciesist language. I prefer 'companion animal.' For one thing, we would no longer allow breeding. People could not create different breeds. There would be no pet shops. If people had companion animals in their homes, those animals would have to be refugees from the animal shelters and the streets. You would have a protective relationship with them just as you would with an orphaned child. But as the surplus of cats and dogs (artificially engineered by centuries of forced breeding) declined, eventually companion animals would be phased out, and we would return to a more symbiotic relationship — enjoyment at a distance.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

The Harper's Forum Book, Jack Hitt, ed., 1989, p. 223.
1980s

People, Dogs, Home, Cats

“In L. A., the only thing within walking distance is your car.”

Rene Balcer (1954) screenwriter, producer and director

Quoted in The Hollywood Reporter, September 9, 2010, TV's Top 50 Showrunners: On Los Angeles.

Cars

“I suddenly remember the distance that I must travel;
I spring from bed and look out to see the time.
The stars and planets are all grown dim in the sky;
Long, long is the road; I cannot stay.
I am going on service, away to the battle-ground,
And I do not know when I shall come back.
I hold your hand with only a deep sigh;
Afterwards, tears—in the days when we are parted.
With all your might enjoy the spring flowers,
But do not forget the time of our love and pride.”

Su Wu

To His Wife (c. 100 BC); written when Su Wu was called to battle against the Hsiung-nu; on parting from his wife.
Translated by Arthur Waley, in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), p. 73

Love, Travel, Star, Spring

“While still in Calcutta I made my first contact with another mighty scripture, the Granth Saheb of Sri Garibdas. This Jat saint of Haryana has been the patron saint of my family ever since an ancestor of ours, who was the saint's contemporary, became his votary in the first half of the 18th century. We revere him as the Satguru (true teacher) who was an avatara of the Highest Being. He was totally illiterate but composed and sang some 18000 verses of very sublime poetry which scales the highest spiritual heights. The story goes that my ancestor would not have his first morning sip of water unless he had paid homage to the saint who lived at a distance of 4 miles from our village.”

Garib Das (1717–1778) Hindu Yogi

Goel, S. R. (2007). How I became a Hindu.

Family, Teachers, Water

“Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, "Whoever believes in Allah and His Apostle, offer prayer perfectly and fasts the month of Ramadan, will rightfully be granted Paradise by Allah, no matter whether he fights in Allah's Cause or remains in the land where he is born." The people said, "O Allah's Apostle! Shall we acquaint the people with the is good news?" He said, "Paradise has one-hundred grades which Allah has reserved for the Mujahidin who fight in His Cause, and the distance between each of two grades is like the distance between the Heaven and the Earth. So, when you ask Allah (for something), ask for Al-firdaus which is the best and highest part of Paradise." (i. e. The sub-narrator added, "I think the Prophet also said, 'Above it (i. e. Al-Firdaus) is the Throne of Beneficent (i. e. Allah), and from it originate the rivers of Paradise."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Sunni Hadith

People, Thinking, Fight, Parting