A Thousand Miles Quotes & Sayings

But here, two thousand miles from home, there was a real shipwreck, a real hope. A choice big enough to change our lives forever. — Gordon Korman

I look to the right as I cross the bridge and smile to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower soaring over rooftops in the distance on the other side of the river. I've seen it in photographs a thousand times, but seeing it in person for the first time that reminds me that I'm really, truly here, thousands of miles away, across an ocean from home. — Kristin Harmel

Hickock whistled and rolled his eyes. "Wow!" he said, and then, summoning his talent for something very like total recall, he began an account of the long ride
the approximately ten thousand miles he and Smith had covered in the past six weeks. He talked for an hour and twenty-five minutes
from two-fifty to four-fifteen
and told, while Nye attempted to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns, and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosi, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more. He gave them the name of the man in Mexico to whom he'd sold his own 1940 Chevrolet, and confessed that he had stolen a newer model in Iowa. — Truman Capote

Curiously, while drone operators are perhaps the safest of all combat troops physically, they have among the highest rates of depression and post-traumatic stress in the military and national security services. Sitting at a video console in Colorado or New York City, killing someone six thousand miles away and then collecting the kids at gymnastics or football practice, having dinner and sitting down to watch Dancing with the Stars in your suburban den was disorienting beyond belief. — Jeffery Deaver

Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading and walking as almost his only pursuits. He voluntarily attended graduate lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them with a rather pathetically intent look in his eyes, as if waiting for something the lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a point. He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of becoming a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand miles away, Amory almost choked with the romantic joy of watching him. Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable to get a foothold. — F Scott Fitzgerald

High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by. - Hendrik Willem Van Loon — Randall Munroe

Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope. — Aspen Matis

If men could move out of infancy at half a mile an hour and get up to eighteen thousand miles an hour in one lifetime, well, who was to assume that the walls of the universe were safe from future men? — Norman Mailer

I hesitate, then put my other hand on top of his. We're partners. Always have been, even when I hate him, when he's a thousand miles away, when he loves my sister ... even when it'd be easier to go it alone for good. — Jackson Pearce

There are a thousand small honest breweries in this country that because they have been too poor and localized to compete with the big boys have been forced to close, or else operate under famous names while they turn out yeast, or hops, or some other important but unnamed ingredient of the main company's beer. Now, with the trains full of soldiers and supplies rather than pale ale, perhaps people far from the great breweries will turn again to their local beer factories and discover, as their fathers did thirty years ago, that a beer carried quietly three miles is better than one shot across three thousand on a fast freight. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Nit even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling you to do, perform, or say anything at all. — Michael Chabon

The inhabitants of England in the age of Chaucer commonly used an expression, to be in hide and hair, meaning to be lost or beyond discovery. But then it disappears from the written record for four hundred years before resurfacing, suddenly and unexpectedly, in America in 1857 as neither hide nor hair. It is dearly unlikely that the phrase went into a linguistic coma for four centuries. So who was quietly preserving it for four hundred years, and why did it so abruptly return to prominence in the sixth decade of the nineteenth century in a country two thousand miles away? — Bill Bryson

Texas Rangers are men who cannot be stampeded. We walk into any situation and handle it without instruction from our commander. Sometimes we work as a unit, sometimes we work alone." He turned his attention to the jurors. "We preserve the law. We track down train and bank robbers. We subdue riots. We guard our borders. We'll follow an outlaw clear across the country if we need to. In my four years of service, I've traveled eighty-six thousand miles on horse, nineteen hundred on train, gone on two hundred thirty scouts, made two hundred seventeen arrests, returned five hundred six head of stolen cattle, assisted forty-three local sheriffs, guarded a half dozen jails, and spent more time on the trail than I have in my own bed. We've been around since before the Alamo, and" - he turned to Hood, impaling him with his stare - "we're touchy as a teased snake when riled, so I wouldn't recommend it. — Deeanne Gist

The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college; of everything remaining exactly as it was, that instant - the idea was so truly heavenly that I'm not sure I thought, even then, it could ever really happen, but I like to believe I did. — Donna Tartt

A journey of a thousand miles starts with just ten digits. — Gayle Forman

the center as well. He laid his cards out. A fortress of lords. The governors threw down their cards, unable to beat him. Everyone waited, breathless, for Lia to lay her cards out. She frowned and shook her head. Then looked at me. Blinked. A slow blink as long as a thousand miles. Then back at Malich. A long sigh, contrite. She laid out her cards. Six black wings. A perfect hand. "I think this beats yours, doesn't it, Malich?" Malich — Mary E. Pearson

After more than two thousand miles on the [Appalachian] trail, you can expect to undergo some personality changes. A heightened affinity for nature infiltrates your life. Greater inner peace. Enhanced self-esteem. A quiet confidence that if I could do that, I can do and should do whatever I really want to do. More appreciation for what you have and less desire to acquire what you don't. A childlike zest for living life to the fullest. A refusal to be embarrassed about having fun. A renewed faith in the essential goodness of humankind. And a determination to repay others for the many kindnesses you have received. — Larry Luxenberg

I'd know you in the dark," he said. "From a thousand miles away. There's nothing you could become that I haven't already fallen in love with. — Rainbow Rowell

I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream-grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. — Jack Kerouac

I've recently noticed "as if for the first time" that when people pray they always look "upward" - i.e. perpendicular to whatever place they're standing - or kneeling or groveling. I deduce that they conceive of their "god" as topologically isomorphic to a huge donut, about a thousand miles wider than Earth. — Robert Anton Wilson

I'm not resentful of the fact that she decided to marry a guy who lives three thousand miles away, forcing me to leave school in the middle of my sophomore year; abandon the best - and pretty much only - friend I've had since kindergarten; leave the city I've been living in for all of my sixteen years. Oh, no. I'm not a bit resentful. — Meg Cabot

'Tracks' is based on the book by Robyn Davidson who, in the mid-Seventies, decided to leave the city, go to the outback, learn to train camels and walk across the Australian desert to the ocean: a journey that is about two thousand miles and will take about six or seven months. — John Curran

For many people it is depressing even to move house. A lost fragment of life always remains. To move to another town, settle in a foreign country, is for everyone a major decision. But, to be suddenly driven forth, within twenty-four hours, from one's home, one's work, the reward of years of steady industry. To become a helpless prey of help. To be sent defenceless out to Asiatic highroads, with several thousand miles of dust, stones, and morass before one. To know that one will never again find a decently human habitation, never again sit down to a proper table. Yet this is all nothing. To be more shackled than any convict. To be counted as outside the law, a vagabond, whom anyone has the right to kill unpunished. — Franz Werfel

Why go on clinging to this clod of earth, this way of life, why pay heed to what your neighbour says? It is so parochial to bind oneself to views which are no longer binding even a couple of hundred miles away. Orient and Occident are chalk-lines drawn before us to fool our timidity. I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught which, nevertheless, did not exist a few thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Ideals, standards, aspirations,
those are chameleon words, and take color from their speakers,
often false tints. A scholarly man of my acquaintance once told me that he traveled a thousand miles into the desert to get away from the word uplift, and it was the first word he heard after he reached his destination. — Carolyn Wells

I once mentioned in a school report, how a young man in one of our English training colleges having to paraphrase the passage in Macbeth beginning,

Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?

turned this line into, "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" And I remarked what a curious state of things it would be, if every pupil of our national schools knew, let us say, that the moon is two thousand one hundred and sixty miles in diameter, and thought at the same time that a good paraphrase for

Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?

was, "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" If one is driven to choose, I think I would rather have a young person ignorant about the moon's diameter, but aware that "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" is bad, than a young person whose education had been such as to manage things the other way — Matthew Arnold

The planes were hijacked, the buildings fell, and thousands of lives were lost nearly a thousand miles from here. But the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were an attack on the heart of America. And standing here in the heartland of America, we say in one voice We will not give in to terrorists; We will not rest until they are found and defeated; We will win this struggle not for glory, nor wealth, nor power, but for justice, for freedom, and for peace; So help us God. — Tom Harkin

What do you want from me, Crank?" Her voice was raw, desperate.
I looked at her. She was so close, but might as well have been a thousand miles away. I said, "I want you to love me. — Charles Sheehan-Miles

We take some big miracles for granted. We're on a planet that's spinning at a thousand miles per hour, traveling through space and we don't worry about God keeping our planet in orbit. We already trust God for the big miracles like our heart beating and today alone, we'll take a thousand breaths, but can we trust Him in the smaller things? — Mark Batterson

If there's one thing all diviners share, it's curiosity. We really can't help it; it's just part of who we are. If you dug out a tunnel somewhere in the wilderness a thousand miles from anywhere and hung a sign on it saying, 'Warning, this leads to the Temple of Horrendous Doom. Do not enter, ever. No, not even then', you'd get back from lunch to find a diviner already inside and two more about to go in.

Come to think about it, that might explain why there are so few of us. — Benedict Jacka

I suppose because I grew up a thousand miles from the sea and missed the great age of passenger liners, I have always been subject to a romantic longing for ocean travel. — Bill Bryson

Breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom. She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth. — Sinclair Lewis

Georgia O'Keeffe moved to rural New Mexico, from which she would sign her letters to the people she loved, "from the faraway nearby." It was a way to measure physical and psychic geography together. Emotion has its geography, affection is what is nearby, within the boundaries of the self. You can be a thousand miles from the person next to you in bed or deeply invested in the survival of a stranger on the other side of the world. — Rebecca Solnit

Jupiter's fly-by had been carried out with impeccable precision. Like a ball on a cosmic pool table, Discovery had bounced off the moving gravitational field of Jupiter, and had gained momentum from the impact. Without using any fuel, she had increased her speed by several thousand miles an hour.
Yet there was no violation of the laws of mechanics; Nature always balances her books, and Jupiter had lost exactly as much momentum as Discovery had gained. The planet had been slowed down - but as its mass was a sextillion times greater than the ship's, the change in its orbit was far too small to be detectable. The time had not yet come when Man could leave his mark upon the Solar System. — Arthur C. Clarke

A traveler s thoughts in the night Wander in a thousand miles of dreams. — Wang Wei

The physics of earthquake behavior is mostly independent of scale. A large earthquake is just a scaled-up version of a small earthquake. That distinguishes earthquakes from animals, for example-a ten inch animal must be structured quite differently from a one-inch animal, and a hundred-inch animal needs a different architecture still, if its bones are not to snap under the increased mass. Clouds, on the other hand, are scaling phenomena like earthquakes. Their characteristic irregularity-describable in terms of fractal dimension-changes not at all as they are observed on different scales. That is why air travelers lose all perspective on how far away a cloud is. Without help from cues such as haziness, a cloud twenty feet away can be indistinguishable from two thousand feet away. Indeed, analysis of satellite pictures has shown an invariant fractal dimension in clouds observed from hundreds of miles away. — James Gleick

MONK ATE DINNER IN the comfort of the kitchen, with Hester and Scuff. There was a checked cloth on the table, and the yellow china jug full of flowers on the dresser at the side was so big it hid half of the plates kept there. The back door was open to let in the warmth of the summer evening and the faint smell of earth and cut grass. "Why's it matter so much?" Scuff asked. They had been speaking of the new canal at Suez. "Because it will take about five thousand miles off the journey from Britain to the Far East," Hester replied, eager to sharpen his interest in anything connected with schoolwork. — Anne Perry

Though the truth may travel a thousand miles and visit a hundred places, it will always find its way home. — Massoud Abbasi

I wonder, when a writer's blocked and doesn't have any resources to pull himself out of it, why doesn't he jump in his car and drive around the U.S.A.? I went last winter for seven thousand miles and it was lovely. Inexpensive, too. — Jim Harrison

The place where the story happened was a world on the back of four elephants perched on the shell of a giant turtle. That's the advantage of space. It's big enough to hold practically anything, and so, eventually, it does.
People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an elephant more than two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the blood. It believes mere size is amazing.
There's nothing amazing about size. Turtles are amazing, and elephants are quite astonishing. But the fact that there's a big turtle is far less amazing than the fact that there is a turtle anywhere. — Terry Pratchett

When you went into a Boston Chicken and ordered quarter-chicken, white, with mash and corn, when that was rung up, that would signal all the way along the supply chain the need for more potatoes to be put on a truck a thousand miles away. — Stephen Elop

I'm the young city bandit, hold myself down singlehanded
For murder raps, I kick my thoughts alone, get remanded
Born alone, die alone, no crew to keep my crown or throne
I'm deep by sound alone, caved inside in a thousand miles from home — Nas

Reacher said, "Our nearest tanks are a thousand miles from Yemen or Afghanistan, and they take weeks and weeks and thousands of people to move. It would be easier to bring Yemen or Afghanistan to them. Also faster and less obtrusive. — Lee Child

You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread. — Henry Miller

Displaced Person's Song

If you see a train this evening,
Far away, against the sky,
Lie down in your woolen blanket,
Sleep and let the train go by.

Trains have called us, every midnight,
From a thousand miles away,
Trains that pass through empty cities,
Trains that have no place to stay.

No one drives the locomotive,
No one tends the staring light,
Trains have never needed riders,
Trains belong to bitter night.

Railway stations stand deserted,
Rights-of-way lie clear and cold,
What we left them, trains inherit,
Trains go on, and we grow old.

Let them cry like cheated lovers,
Let their cries find only wind,
Trains are meant for night and ruin,
And we are meant for song and sin. — Thomas Pynchon

It is difficult to grasp the immensity and significance of the extreme reverence paid to the Goddess over a period of (at least) seven thousand years and over miles of land cutting across national boundaries and vast expanses of sea. Yet it is vital to do just that to fully comprehend the longevity as well as the widespread power and influence this religion once held. — Merlin Stone

...Most peasants never traveled farther than twenty-five miles from the village of their birth. They had strong social ties to their communities, and could not imagine living anywhere else.
"In many places, peasant villages were located within a noble's estate, which was called a manor. Manors could be as small as one hundred acres or as large as several thousand acres and typically encompassed a mixture of cultivated and uncultivated land. Forests provided wood, nuts, and berries; pastures and meadows offered grazing for livestock; and lakes and rivers gave water and fish. But the largest acreage was devoted to agriculture, apportioned among the peasants and the noble, although the noble did no farming himself. Instead the peasants collectively worked both his land and theirs. — Patricia D. Netzley

A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep. — Leo Tolstoy

To take a journey of a thousand miles, you have to begin with the first step from the place where you stand; the romantic description of the journey and the things the body sees on the way and the description of the scenery are of no use unless you lift your foot and take the first step. — Vimala Thakar

I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they'd spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don't think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don't like crowds, I don't like noise, I don't like anarchy, I don't even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation-not better, different. I don't like children who are part of the wild life. So are polecats and rats and other sorts of hostile and untrained vermin. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild life without confusing itself with it. — Wallace Stegner

Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identical-looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It's a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago. — Terry Pratchett

Monroe is about sixty miles outside of New York City. It's home to approximately eight thousand people. It's a small community where most everyone knows one another. There's nothing but strip malls and second-tier grocery chains you never see elsewhere. If you click on the "Attractions" tab on TripAdvisor's Monroe page, it brings up a message that says, "I'm sorry, you must have clicked here by mistake. No one could possibly be planning a trip to Monroe to see its 'Attractions.' I have a feeling about why you'd want to go to Monroe. Here, let me redirect you to a suicide-prevention site. — Aziz Ansari

They've got a wall in China, it's a thousand miles long. To keep out the foreigners, they made it strong. And I've got a wall around me, you can't even see. — Paul Simon

And I began walking. A thousand miles, or two, I would carry her all the way to Dalbreck if I had to. No one would pry her from my arms again. — Mary E. Pearson

But I can be a very kind and caring person, especially if I am about three thousand miles away in a different country. — Louise Rennison

Only the Indians respect the forest," Paolo said. "The white people cut it all down." Mato Grosso, he went on, was being transformed into domesticated farmland, much of it dedicated to soybeans. In Brazil alone, the Amazon has, over the last four decades, lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest cover - an area bigger than France. Despite government efforts to reduce deforestation, in just five months in 2007 as much as two thousand seven hundred square miles were destroyed, a region larger than the state of Delaware. Countless — David Grann

I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - around the sun. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand feet for the base.
And it has advantages. The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson sphere. We can spin it on its axis for gravity. A rotation speed of 770 m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal. We wouldn't even need to roof it over. Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the sun. Very little air will leak over the edges.
Lord knows the thing is roomy enough. With three million times the surface area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the crowding. — Larry Niven

I scurry out to the three-way mirror. With an extra-large sweatshirt over the top, you can hardly tell that they are Effert's jeans. Still no Mom. I adjust the mirror so I can see reflections of reflections, miles and miles of me and my new jeans. I hook my hair behind my ears. I should have washed it. My face is dirty. I lean into the mirror. Eyes after eyes after eyes stare back at me. Am I in there somewhere? A thousand eyes blink. No makeup. Dark circles. I pull the side flaps of the mirror in closer, folding myself into the looking glass and blocking out the rest of the store. My face becomes a Picasso sketch, my body slicing into dissecting cubes. I saw a movie once where a woman was burned over eighty percent of her body and they had to wash all the dead skin off. They wrapped her in bandages, kept her drugged, and waited for skin grafts. They actually sewed her into a new skin. — Laurie Halse Anderson

A person standing in a field is actually moving at a thousand miles an hour around the Earth's center, which is revolving around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour, which is revolving around the center of the Milky Way at a pace beggaring belief, which is hurtling outward from the point of origin at speeds faster than any craft we had ever made. — Stephen Moss

Did she look different? She felt different, as if she had traveled a thousand miles and a hundred lifetimes in a few short minutes. — Jennifer Beckstrand

Would my head were a head of lettuce. I drove the last car over the Sagamore Bridge before the state police closed it off. The Cape Cod Canal all atempest beneath. No cars coming, no cars going. The bridge cables flapping like rubber bands. You think in certain circumstances a few thousand feet of bridge isn't a thousand miles? The hurricane wiped out Dennis. Horace thanked God for insurance. I saved our little girl. You want me to say, Hurrah! Hurrah! but I can't, I won't, because to save her once isn't to save her, and still she thumps as if the world was something thumpable. As if it wasn't silence on a fundamental level. Yap on, wife, yap on. Thump, daughter, thump. Louder, Orangutan, louder. I can't hear you. — Peter Orner

It took me almost two thousand miles in the woods to see I had to do some hard work that wasn't simply walking - that I needed to begin respecting my own body's boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me.

Moving forward, I wanted rules.

First - when I felt unsafe I'd leave, immediately. The first time, not the tenth time. Not after a hundred red flags smacked in wind violently, clear as trail signs pointing the way to SNAKES. Not after I'd been bitten - the violation. If I wasn't interested, I would reject the man blatantly. — Aspen Matis

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. LaoTzu. Just make sure that you step in the right direction. — Lao-Tzu

A tree that can fill the span of a man's arms grows from a downy tip; A terrace nine stories high rises from level earth; A journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath one's feet. — Laozi

It's always times like these when I think of you and I wonder if you ever think of me. — Vanessa Carlton

Well, I got pretty good and went on the road with a group. We starved. At that time I didn't realize that you'd work one gig in Kansas City, the next in Florida and the next gig will be in Louisville. You know, a thousand miles a night. That was really rough, man. — Wes Montgomery

The savage, rocky shores of Christmas Island, 200 miles south of Java, in the Indian Ocean. It's November, the moon is in its third quarter, and the sun is just setting. In a few hours from now, on this very shore, a thousand million lives will be launched. — David Attenborough

Hana's voice is completely toneless. I can't tell if she's being sarcastic. But she is lucky, whether she knows it or not.
And there it is: Even though we're standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart.
You came from different starts and you'll come to different ends : That's an old saying, something Carol used to repeat a lot. I never really understood how true it was until now. — Lauren Oliver

Love might be a thousand miles away ,but you'll always find it. — Haddix

'm constantly depressed by the Mexican gang members I meet in East L.A. who essentially live their lives inside five or six blocks. They are caught in some tiny ghetto of the mind that limits them to these five blocks because, they say, "I'm Mexican. I live here." And I say, "What do you mean you live here - five blocks? Your granny, your abualita, walked two thousand miles to get here. She violated borders, moved from one language to another, moved from a sixteenth-century village to a twenty-first-century city, and you live within five blocks?" — Richard Rodriguez

Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is - which was the only way he could get there - thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely his was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be a true philosopher, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have 'broken his digester. — Herman Melville

The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. - — Jeff Olson

If you run a thousand miles a minute, you can expect to wear out a few pairs of shoes. — Ellis

From a thousand miles away. There's nothing you could become that I haven't already fallen in love with. He — Rainbow Rowell

The planet spins at over a thousand miles an hour all the time. Actually, it's going around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, even if it wasn't sponging. So you can move plenty fast without going anywhere. — Maggie Stiefvater

Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Britain, the latter the colonial administrator, forcibly removed the indigenous inhabitants of the islands, the Chagossians. Most of the two thousand deportees ended up more than a thousand miles away in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they were thrown into lives of poverty and forgotten. The purpose of this expulsion was to create a major US military base on one of the Chagossian islands, Diego Garcia. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

She was ushered into a passage where the only light came from the tallow taper in the rabbi's hand. The house smelled of chicken soup. In the thousand miles she and Rosa and the children had traveled from Siberia, passed along like parcels from settlement to Jewish settlement, sometimes in houses, often in huts, that smell had been the one constant, as if they had followed its trail by sniffing, like dogs. However poor their hosts, a hen had been killed in their honor because hospitality demanded it. — Ariana Franklin

Better to live under one tyrant a thousand miles away, than a thousand tyrants one mile away. — Daniel Bliss

The solution is so obvious, but for so many of us we would travel a hundred miles out of the way to avoid it, gather a thousand opinions on the way and take a pit stop in fear to check our map before we proceed through hell. Heaven was always a direct flight with no layovers. — Shannon L. Alder

A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon. — Victor Hugo

The sport of skiing consists of wearing three thousand dollars worth of clothes and equipment and driving two hundred miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and get drunk. — P. J. O'Rourke

How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from Indianness to Englishness, an immeasurable distance. Or, not
very far at all, because they rose from one great city, fell to another. The distance between cities is always small; a villager, travelling a
hundred miles to town, traverses emptier, darker, more terrifying space. — Salman Rushdie

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. — Ali Binazir

She asked herself a thousand times why she had hungered so desperately to belong body and soul to Joaquin Andieta when truth she had never been totally happy in his arms, and could explain it only in terms of first love. She had been ready to fall in love when he came to the house to unload some cargo; the rest was instinct. She had merely obeyed the most powerful and ancient of calls, but it had happened an eternity ago and seven thousand miles away. Who she was then and what she had seen in him she could not say, only that now her heart was far away from there. Not only was she tired of looking for him but deep down she did not want to find him; at the same time, though, she could not go on riddled with doubt. She needed an ending for that phase in order to begin a new love with a clean slate — Isabel Allende

I knew what was waiting out there for me," he said. "Terrifying things. There were German patrol boats, mine fields, and nearly a thousand miles of stormy seas." "So why did you do it?" "Because also waiting for me was the most terrifying and wonderful thing of all. The future. — Michael Dobbs

Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth - and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere. — Rebecca Solnit

Valentine
my friends stitched it up with golden thread
like a red
satin pillow they gave me other whole ones too
roses and charms and red candles
milagros to repair the real one
they told me i was no longer allowed to give it away
a pretty pin cushion
a piece of mexican folk art
a hundred beating poems left unanswered
like a thing to wear around the neck
they said you must heal we will protect you
but i sat weeping at the computer forging ahead anyway
with the small stitched thing struggling in my chest
it knew that it had needed to be torn
so that it could recognize and receive the hundred kindnesses
traveling across three thousand miles at the speed of light
a storm of petals and beautiful words and tiny hearts to keep it
company — Francesca Lia Block

I'd hate to see the look on my face when that mask came down and I saw the face behind it. Thinner than I remember. Paler. The eyes sunk deep into their sockets, kind of glazed over, like he's sick or hurt, but I recognize it, I know whose face was hidden behind that mask. I just can't process it.
Here, in this place. A thousand years later and a million miles from the halls of George Barnard High School. Here, in the belly of the beast at the bottom of the world, standing right in front of me.
Benjamin Thomas Parish.
And Cassiopeia Marie Sullivan, having a full-bore out-of-body experience, seeing herself seeing him. The last time she saw him was in their high school gymnasium after the lights went out, and then only the back of his head, and the only times that she's seen him since happened in her mind, the rational part of which always knew Ben Parish was dead like everyone else. — Rick Yancey

I am a collection of thoughts and memories and likes and dislikes. I am the things that have happened to me and the sum of everything I've ever done. I am the clothes I wear on my back. I am every place and every person and every object I have ever come across. I am a bag of bones stuck to a very large rock spinning a thousand miles an hour. — Macaulay Culkin

We live on the thin skin of a planet that rotates at about a thousand miles an hour, travels sixty-six thousand miles an hour around a gigantic gas fire, in a galaxy of a billion more wild fires moving at 1.3 trillion miles an hour across a barely comprehendible Universe. Forget the mission of the Starship Enterprise; we are unwitting galactic explorers traveling into uncharted territory at terrifying speed in every second of our existence. Cataclysmic events can happen at any moment. — Larry J. Dunlap

Along the road you travel, may the miles be a thousand times more lovely than lonely. — Douglas Pagels

Eight hundred and more years later, more than three and a half thousand miles away, and now more than one thousand years ago, a storm fell upon our ancestors' city like a bomb. Their childhoods slipped into the water and were lost, the piers built of memories on which they once ate candy and pizza, the boardwalks of desire under which they hid from the summer sun and kissed their first lips. The roofs of houses flew through the night sky like disoriented bats, and the attics where they stored their past stood exposed to the elements until it seemed that everything they once were had been devoured by the predatory sky. Their secrets drowned in flooded basements and they could no longer remember them. Their power failed them. Darkness fell. — Salman Rushdie

A journey to Thousand miles begins with one step — John F. Kennedy

Life is a collection of a million tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous pearls. Strung together, lined up through the days and the years, they make a life. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies. The Heisman Trophy winner knows this. He knows that his big moment was not when they gave him the trophy. It was the thousand times he went to practice instead of going back to bed. It was the miles run on rainy days, the healthy meals when a burger sounded like heaven. That big moment represented and rested on a foundation of moments that had come before it. — Shauna Niequist

There is no need for that language, or for the yelling, I'm on the phone with you, not a thousand miles away. I can hear you perfectly."
He was such a dickhead — L.A. Casey

We wasted ten years and you're worried about a few thousand miles? Hell, we've got airplanes, we've got email, they've invented fucking cell phones. Jesus, if it comes down to it, I'll even write you a fucking letter. — Jane Harvey-Berrick

The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land. — Joseph Conrad

Love is kisses and touches and all the little things that make your body flood with emotions such as need, want, protectiveness, jealousy, hurt, and anger. It can take your breath away, or smother you at times, and make you feel like you can't go on. Your heart may race a thousand miles per minute, then slow down, and then race again, just with a simple look. Love is deadly and can kill you from the inside out if you let it. It makes you do stupid, ridiculous things, and say senseless sappy words, or listen to silly love songs, jazz, or dance in the streets, or laugh, or smile. Love is a weapon, or a drug, and can drive a person mad. I know what love is ... — Lyra Parish

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land. — Katherine Dunn

When the superior programmer refrains from coding, his force is felt for a thousand miles. — Eric S. Raymond