Quotes & Sayings About Distance Traveled

The original route, whether called U. S. 40 or something else, will furnish the main-traveled road until someone disproves the geometrical proposition that a straight line is the shortest distance between points. — George R. Stewart

Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled ... — Mavis Gallant

On a clear night the naked eye can see about 4,500 stars, so the astronomers say. The telescope of even a small observatory makes nearly 2,000,000 stars visible, and a modern reflecting telescope brings the light from thousands of millions more to the viewer - specks of light in the Milky Way. But in the colossal dimensions of the cosmos our stellar system is only a tiny part of an incomparably larger stellar system - of a cluster of Milky Ways, one might say, containing some twenty galaxies within a radius of 1,500,000 light-years (1 light-year=the distance traveled by light in a year, i.e., 186,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 miles). And even this vast number of stars is small in comparison with the many thousands of spiral nebulae disclosed by the electronic telescope. Disclosed to the present day, I should emphasize, for research of this kind is only just beginning. — Erich Von Daniken

She conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting. — Marilynne Robinson

Surely she had never traveled a greater emotional distance — Margot Lee Shetterly

Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents, cousins, bothers, or uncles, and only leave the house to go to the movies or to the nearest bar. "How're you making it?" on may ask, running into them along the block, or in the bar. "Oh, I'm TV-ing it"; with the saddest, sweetest, most shamefaced of smiles, and from a great distance. This distance one is compelled to respect; anyone who has traveled so far will not easily be dragged again into the world. There are further retreats, of course, than the TV screen or the bar. There are those who are simply sitting on their stoops, "stoned," animated for a moment only, and hideously, by the approach of someone who may lend them the money for a "fix." Or by the approach of someone from whom they can purchase it, one of the shrewd ones, on the way to prison or just coming out. — James Baldwin

The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants. — Isabel Wilkerson

The word "journal" has in its root the word jour, French for day. A journey was the distance that could be traveled in a day. A journal, therefore, consisted of the writing one recorded per day. — Sheila Bender

And, as a consequence of the pressure that we've applied over the last couple of weeks, we have Syria
for the first time
acknowledging that it has chemical weapons, agreeing to join the convention that prohibits the use of chemical weapons, and the Russians
their primary sponsors
saying that they will push Syria to get all of their chemical weapons out. The distance that we've traveled over these couple of weeks is remarkable. — Barack Obama

This I need to be told?" she'd snapped. As if, sitting in this kitchen where she felt the disapproving presence of his dead mother, she could forget where he'd grown up. Cole was the youngest of six children, with five sisters who'd traveled no farther than the bottom of the hollow, where Dad Widener had deeded each daughter an acre on which to build a house when she married, meanwhile saving back the remainder of the sixty-acre farm for his only son, Cole. The family cemetery was up behind the orchard. The Wideners' destiny was to occupy this same plot of land for their lives and eternity, evidently. To them the word town meant Egg Fork, a nearby hamlet of a few thousand souls, nine churches, and a Kroger's. Whereas Lusa was a dire outsider from the other side of the mountains, from Lexington - a place in the preposterous distance. And now she was marooned behind five sisters-in-law who flanked her gravel right-of-way to the mailbox. — Barbara Kingsolver

Success isn't how far you got, but the distance you traveled from where you started. — Steve Prefontaine

And at the end they traveled again. There was a time when Arthur Dent would not. He said that the Bistromathic Drive had revealed to him that time and distance were one, that mind and Universe were one, that perception and reality were one, and that the more one traveled the more one stayed in one place, and that what with one thing and another he would rather just stay put for a while and sort it all out in his mind, which was now at one with the Universe so it shouldn't take too long and he could get a good rest afterward, put in a little flying practice and learn to cook, which he had always meant to do. — Douglas Adams

Sure flattery never traveled so far as three thousand miles; it is now only for truth, which over takes all things, to reach you at this distance. — Alexander Pope

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started. — Henry Ward Beecher

What is a medium like telepresence but the extension--no, the very definition--of ourselves? Are we, who live things at a distance, the same species as our ancestors, we could hear of events in the same town only by going there? If you met a person from that time, would you have any more in common with him than with a whale, or a chimpanzee? You have traveled to meet me with better than seven-league boots; and I have done more math this morning than Pythagoras, and Euclid, and all Ancient Greece and Rome. Surely, if we are human, they were animals; and we a race of gods, if they were men. — Raphael Carter

He learned how to look at himself from a distance, to see himself first of all as a man among other men, then as a collection of random particles of matter, and finally as a single speck of dust - and the farther he traveled from his point of origin, she said, the closer he came to achieving greatness. — Paul Auster

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end. — Peter Singer

An ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up to him. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Some trips are more than distance traveled in miles. — Lucy Knisley

I've never believed in measuring one's worth by the size of his or her bank account. I prefer to look at distance traveled. — Dan Rather

In fifteen years, Sachs traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by the time he came to that last place, I doubt he even knew who he was anymore. So much distance had been covered by then, it wouldn't have been possible for him to remember where he had begun. — Paul Auster

The cheapest way to travel, and the way to travel the farthest in the shortest distance, is to go afoot, carrying a dipper, a spoon, and a fish line, some Indian meal, some salt, and some sugar ... Any one of these things I mean, not all together. I have traveled thus some hundreds of miles without taking any meal in a house, sleeping on the ground when convenient, and found it cheaper, and in many respects more profitable, than staying at home. So that some have inquired why it would not be best to travel always. But I never thought of traveling simply as a means of getting a livelihood. — Henry David Thoreau

[A] journey becomes a pilgrimage as we discover, day by day, that the distance traveled is less important than the experience gained. — Ernest Kurtz

Paul Revere's ride is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-of-mouth epidemic. A piece of extraordinary news traveled a long distance in a very short time, mobilizing an entire region to arms. Not all word-of-mouth epidemics are this sensational, of course. But it is safe to say that word of mouth is-even in this age of mass communications and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns-still the most important form of human communication — Malcolm Gladwell

The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth on my eyelids. Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that sunlight was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings on the universe, that the cosmic order did not overlook this momentary fact. — Haruki Murakami

From dawn each day the boats traveled, until their shadows grew so long that they joined each vessel with the one behind so that, instead of resembling a procession of dark swans in the distance, they seemed to turn into snakes, inching forward on waters turned to fire by the western sunset ahead. While on the bank, the last red light from the huge sky eerily caught the stands of bare larch and birch so that it appeared as if whole armies with massed lances were waiting by the riverbank to greet them. — Edward Rutherfurd

Things should be judged by distance traveled rather than by current position. — Andrew Davidson

You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that wasn't made for them by navigating a playground that was. — John Green

He had been aware of the distance traveled by his heart, similar to the way a hiker became lost in the wilderness. A half mile out and you could still see where you had started, could easily find the way back home. But ten miles and a number of forks in your trail later and there was no going back. At that point, you had no choice but to marshal the resources to build yourself a shelter and put down fresh roots. — J.R. Ward

Sanctification is more about the direction than the distance we have traveled. — Edward T. Welch

She was both more assured and quieter, deeper. It was as if the distance she had traveled had ironed out some of her foolish impulsiveness, her flippancy. — Amanda Coplin

His errors and failures have not traveled the same distance as his successes. — Rick Bass

WALLY: . . . That may be why I never understand what's going on at a party, and I'm always completely confused. I mean, we'll come home, and Debby will describe some incredible incident, and I won't have even noticed it. Everything passes in a kind of trance. You know, Debby once said after one of these New York evenings that she thought she'd traveled a greater distance just by journeying from her origins in the suburbs of Chicago to that New York evening than her grandmother had traveled in making her way from the steppes of Russia to the suburbs of Chicago. — Wallace Shawn