Closeness Distance Quotes & Sayings

Intimacy between people requires closeness as well as distance. It is like dancing. Sometimes we are very close, touching each other or holding each other; sometimes we move away from each other and let the space between us become an area where we can freely move.
To keep the right balance between closeness and distance requires hard work, especially since the needs of the partners may be quite different at a given moment. One might desire closeness while the other wants distance. One might want to be held while the other looks for independence. A perfect balance seldom occurs, but the honest and open search for that balance can give birth to a beautiful dance, worthy to behold. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

He crashed over me like a wave and I was drowning. He shone so brightly and I was burning. Touched, by his hands and his body and his unintended mercies, I needed my distance back. Difficult, though, when my skin sang at his closeness and I blazed with wanting. I wanted to put my lips against his neck. I wanted to lick the sweat from where it would gather like glitter in the secret hollows of his flesh. I wanted him naked in my arms, like I'd had him in Brighton, but with not even darkness between us this time. I wanted to give him pleasure. Lavish him in it. Bedeck him with it, like pirate gold. Weave him a crown of my lost dreams. I wanted to kneel at his feet and suck his cock. I wanted him on his back, so I could look into his eyes while I fucked him. — Alexis Hall

The redwood is the glory of the Coast Range. It extends along the western slope, in a nearly continuous belt about ten miles wide, from beyond the Oregon boundary to the south of Santa Cruz, a distance of nearly four hundred miles, and in massive, sustained grandeur and closeness of growth surpasses all the other timber woods of the world. — John Muir

The professional ideal of "detached concern" among medical practitioners represents this blend of closeness and distance.1 Many physicians believe it is a prerequisite for effective patient care. But, much like oil and water, detachment and concern do not mix easily. — Christina Maslach

There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. When we fix or locate them definitively, we injure our growth. It is an interesting imaginative exercise to interchange them: to consider what is near as distant and to consider the distant as intimate. — John O'Donohue

I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it. — Cormac McCarthy

Distance can make a love fade, while closeness can make hate flare; as distance can make hate fade, while closeness can make love flare. — Anthony Liccione

Why is love beyond all measure of other human possibilities so rich and such a sweet burden for the one who has been struck by it? Because we change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves. Then we would like to thank the beloved, but find nothing that would do it adequately. We can only be thankful to ourselves. Love transforms gratitude into faithfulness to ourselves and into an unconditional faith in the Other. Thus love steadily expands its most intimate secret. Closeness here is existence in the greatest distance from the other- the distance that allows nothing to dissolve - but rather presents the "thou" in the transparent, but "incomprehensible" revelation of the "just there". That the presence of the other breaks into our own life - this is what no feeling can fully encompass. Human fate gives itself to human fate, and it is the task of pure love to keep this self-surrender as vital as on the first day. — Martin Heidegger

love is the strongest emotion. we never feels the distance. even at large distances apart from each other, both lovers will feel the closeness always. — Joseph Mathew

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him. — Robert M. Pirsig

Once the
exhilaration of their reunion wore off, once the newness of their lovemaking was no longer so
new, how would she see him? No matter how careful he was, invariably someday he would
do something to make her angry. What then? Would all the old unhappiness rush to the fore?
Would she remember that he had once betrayed her and regret that she'd ever given him a
second chance?
Or would she protect herself from the beginning by keeping a certain distance from him, so
that their closeness would always fall short of true communion, always denying him that final
forgiveness so that he could never hurt her again? — Sherry Thomas

There's something about sitting alone in the dark that reminds you how big the world really is, and how far apart we all are. The stars look like they're so close, you could reach out and touch them. But you can't. Sometimes things look a lot closer than they are. — Kami Garcia

The closeness of reality and the distance of myth, because if there is no distance you aren't amazed, and if there is no closeness you aren't moved. — Peter Brook

The harmony of two bodies expressed in this single touch, bridging their differences and bending their moral reserve, was as powerful and wild as
physical fulfillment, yet there was nothing false in this harmony, no
illusion created that just by touching, our bodies could express feelings
that rationality prevented us from making permanent; I might even say that
our bodies cooly preserved their good sense, scheming and keeping each
other in check, as if to say, I'll yield unreservedly to the madness of
the moment but only if and when you do the same; but this physical plea
for passion and reason, spontaneity and calculation, closeness and
distance, took our bodies past the point where, clinging to desire and
striving for the moment of gratification, they would seek a new and more complete harmony. — Peter Nadas

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus. — Michael Haneke

All of a sudden I understand why I like Aliki Barnstones poems so much. They remind me of the one she has studied most - shall we call her her master - Emily Dickinson. Not in the forms, not, as such, in the music, and not in the references; but in that weird intimacy, that eerie closeness, that absolute confession of soul ... In Barnstone, too, the two worlds are intensely present, and the voice moves back and forth between them. She has the rare art of distance and closeness. It gives her her fine music, her wisdom, her form. She is a fine poet. — Gerald Stern

I met Peter Brook, the theater director, who's been based in Paris for many years at the Bouffes du Nord. I admire him tremendously. Some years ago, he was in New York, and he gave an interview with The Times, and what he said was this: "In my work, I try to capture the closeness of the everyday and the distance of myth. Because, without the closeness, you can't be moved, and without the distance, you can't be amazed." Isn't that extraordinary? — Paul Auster

We criticize mothers for closeness. We criticize fathers for distance. How many of us have expected less from our fathers and appreciated what they gave us more? How many of us always let them off the hook? — Ellen Goodman

As my friend John says, we men are quick to give the three slaps on the back of the friend we're hugging, each one of which stands for a single word: "I'm. Not. Gay." And after giving that hug, we try hard to preserve some kind of closeness but, at the same time, keep it moderated with an appropriate distance. — Wesley Hill

Science boasts of the distance of its stars; of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always the Kingdom of Heaven is "At Hand." — Gilbert K. Chesterton

The need here is professional closeness tempered by emotional distance. — Robert Audi

Intimacy is not a happy medium. It is a way of being in which the tension between distance and closeness is dissolved and a new horizon appears. Intimacy is beyond fear. — Henri Nouwen

Immeasurable space.
Closeness.
The shortest distance between two women. — Kris Radish

Maybe this is what we've needed all along. Distance from everything else, and closeness to each other. — David Levithan

Well, I've kept you waiting long enough, he said, peering at me from that distance which drinking adds between people and which, at odd turns in the evening, seems closeness itself. — Ray Bradbury

This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy. — Judith Viorst

Estrangement and belonging, an effect of distance and closeness at the same time. — Elena Ferrante