Quotes & Sayings About Distant Places

I think my soul never was in such an agony before. I felt no restraint, for the treasures of divine grace were opened to me. I wrestled for absent friends, for the ingathering of souls, for multitudes of poor souls, and for many that I thought were the children of God, in many distant places. I was in such an agony, for half an hour before sunset, till near dark, that I was all over wet with sweat: but yet is seemed to me that I had wasted away the day, and had done nothing. Oh!, my dear Savior did sweat blood for poor souls! — David Brainerd

Have you really not noticed, then, that here of all places, in this private, personal solitude that surrounds me, I have turned to you? All the memories of my youth speak to me as I walk, just as the sea shells crunch under my feet on the beach. The crash of every wave awakens far-distant reverberations within me ... I hear the rumble of bygone days, and in my mind the whole endless series of old passions surges forward like the billows. I remember my spasms, my sorrows, gusts of desire that whistled like wind in the rigging, and vast vague longings that swirled in the dark like a flock of wild gulls in a stormcloud ... On whom should I lean, if not on you? My weary mind turns for refreshment to the thought of you as a dusty traveler might sink onto a soft and grassy bank ... — Gustave Flaubert

Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own. — Terry Brooks

Other lives wind themselves into your own and then leave for distant places or wink out like extinguished lamps, and then all the evidence you have that there was ever any time is a few scribbled words and a few blurred pictures. Then those burn in fire or blow away in wind and you have nothing. — Dexter Palmer

The cure is in the house, not brought by other hands from distant places, but by its own, in agony and blood. — Aeschylus

America does not have the luxury of withdrawing from the world, our security, and our prosperity, and our values demand that we remain engaged and involved in
often distant places. — Jeb Bush

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

To break out of the chaos of my darkness Into a lucid day is all my will. My words like eyes in night, stare to reach A centre for their light: and my acts thrown To distant places by impatient violence Yet lock together to mould a path of stone Out of my darkness into a lucid day. — Stephen Spender

The Internet is allowing for us to really experience people in some of the most distant places in the world - as other people just like us. So get to know people, seek out bloggers from a country you're kind of curious about. It's about building empathy and breaking through to the point of recognizing people as people. — Jimmy Wales

Going about one's native land one is inclined to take many things for granted, roads and buildings, roofs, windows and doorways, the walls that shelter strangers, the house one has never entered, trees which are like other trees, pavements which are no more than cobblestones. But when we are distant from them we find that those things have become dear to us, a street, trees and roofs, blank walls, doors and windows; we have entered those houses without knowing it, we have left something of our heart in the very stonework. Those places we no longer see, perhaps will never see again but still remember, have acquired and aching charm; they return to us with the melancholy of ghosts, a hallowed vision and as it were the true face of France. We love and evoke them such as they were; and such as to us they still are, we cling to them and will not have them altered, for the face of our country is our mother's face. — Victor Hugo

I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our lives to remain connected and coherent ... And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren't so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite. — Rebecca Solnit

These words: migrant birds, arriving from distant places with story and metaphor caught in their feathers; — Robert Macfarlane

Libraries are fascinating places; sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of traveling to distant lands. — Umberto Eco

Hans?" the Fairy Godmother said. "Can you remember what made you happy when you were a young boy?" It didn't take him long to remember. "Places like this promenade," he said. "Why?" she asked. "It's a place of unlimited possibility," he said. "At any moment, anyone or anything could appear. A parade could march through the field, a flock of birds from a tropical land could fly across the skies, or a king from a distant country could sail through the waters on a massive ship. I suppose any child is happiest wherever his imagination is stimulated." "Interesting," she said. — Chris Colfer

As a child I harbored a deep interest in geography. I remember that in the library of my house, immersed in my fantasies, my favorite readings were about the deserts, the mountains, the tribes and all that would take me with the imagination in distant lands and people that inhabited the Earth. And this is why, when I grew up, I decided to make travelling, my dream of life, to explore the world and to describe through my books all the wonderful emotions that evoke the places I visit. — Barbara Athanassiadis

I like words. Words are places, rooms, distant airs, thin and tropical. They make us feel and imagine we are more than our bodies. — Rickie Lee Jones

Lots of science fiction deals with distant times and places. Intrepid prospectors in the Asteroid Belt. Interstellar epics. Galactic empires. Trips to the remote past or future. — Edward M. Lerner

The rare beauty of distant places made home seem as if we had been thrown out of paradise and sent to purgatory or worse. — Scott Haas

If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five. And then he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information. And he, like a runner, immobile in his smeared printing apron bringing it to them. Then the listeners would for a small space of time drift away into a healing place like curative waters. — Paulette Jiles

Once leprosy had gone, and the figure of the leper was no more than a distant memory, these structures still remained. The game of exclusion would be played again, often in these same places, in an oddly similar fashion two or three centuries later. The role of the leper was to be played by the poor and by the vagrant, by prisoners and by the 'alienated', and the sort of salvation at stake for both parties in this game of exclusion is the matter of this study. — Michel Foucault

Sometimes in life we must slowly distant ourselves from people and places we feel unconformable. Don't feel bad feel freedom. — Ron Baratono

When every dream
has turned to dust,
and your highest hopes
no longer soar.
When places you
once yearned to see,
grow further away
on distant shores.
When every night
you close your eyes,
and long inside
for something more.
Remember this
and only this,
if nothing else
you can recall
There was a life
a girl once led,
where you were loved
the most of all. — Lang Leav

The survivor movements were also challenging the notion of a dysfunctional family as the cause and culture of abuse, rather than being one of the many places where abuse nested. This notion, which in the 1990s and early 1980s was the dominant understanding of professionals characterised the sex abuser as a pathetic person who had been denied sex and warmth by his wife, who in turn denied warmth to her daughters. Out of this dysfunctional triad grew the far-too-cosy incest dyad. Simply diagnosed, relying on the signs: alcoholic father, cold distant mother, provocative daughter. Simply resolved, because everyone would want to stop, to return to the functioning family where mum and dad had sex and daughter concentrated on her exams. Professionals really believed for a while that sex offenders would want to stop what they were doing. They thought if abuse were decriminalised, abusers would seek help. The survivors knew different. P5 — Beatrix Campbell

Oftentimes we call Life bitter names, but only when we ourselves are bitter and dark. And we deem her empty and unprofitable, but only when the soul goes wandering in desolate places, and the heart is drunken with overmindfulness of self.
Life is deep and high and distant; and though only your vast vision can reach even her feet, yet she is near; and though only the breath of your breath reaches her heart, the shadow of your shadow crosses her face, and the echo of your faintest cry becomes a spring and an autumn in her breast.
And life is veiled and hidden, even as your greater self is hidden and veiled. Yet when Life speaks, all the winds become words; and when she speaks again, the smiles upon your lips and the tears in your eyes turn also into words. When she sings, the deaf hear and are held; and when she comes walking, the sightless behold her and are amazed and follow her in wonder and astonishment. — Kahlil Gibran

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Luck is a strong horse; it can carry man to very distant places! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

People arrived in town all the time. It wasn't that distant from other places, and it was along a major thoroughfare. There was a Taco Bell where people could pee. There was a gas station where people could pee. There were all sorts of things. — Joseph Fink

Unlike prose writing, the strange process of writing with pictures encourages associations and recollections to accumulate literally in front of your eyes; people, places, and events appear out of nowhere. Doors open into rooms remembered from childhood, faces form into dead relatives, and distant loves appear, almost magically, on the page- all deceptively manageable, visceral, the combinations sometimes even revelatory. — Chris Ware

Science fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places. It often concerns itself with scientific or technological change, and it usually involves matters whose importance is greater than the individual or the community; often civilization or the race itself is in danger. — James Gunn

Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting. — Jane Smiley

Battles against Rome have been lost and won before, but hope was never abandoned, since we were always here in reserve. We, the choicest flower of Britain's manhood, were hidden away in her most secret places. Out of sight of subject shores, we kept even our eyes free from the defilement of tyranny. We, the most distant dwellers upon earth, the last of the free, have been shielded till today by our very remoteness and by the obscurity in which it has shrouded our name. Now, the farthest bounds of Britain lie open to our enemies; and what men know nothing about they always assume to be a valuable prize ...
A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them. They are the only people on earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally tempting. To robbery, butchery and rapine, they give the lying name of 'government'; they create a desolation and call it peace ... — Tacitus

In places, the drop was just a little ripple - a fall of some five feet or so. But in others, majestic waterfalls plunged fifty feet or more before pounding onto the next stone platform. It looked like a man-made effect, for the various split streams and waterfalls eventually ran back together into the river, which flowed away from the city toward distant Elendel. — Brandon Sanderson

In any case, suffice it to say I enjoyed hearing about faraway places. I had stocked up a whole store of these places, like a bear getting ready for hibernation. I'd close my eyes, and streets would materialize, rows of houses take shape. I could hear people's voices, feel the gentle, steady rhythm of their lives, those people so distant, whom I'd probably never know. — Haruki Murakami

Let the sea breeze blow your hair, let the sunset bring tranquility to your heart, let the distant places you travel allow you to explore yourself. — Somya Kedia

This, too, was like seeing double. This was where my heartaches began.

In combat zones there is no structure, the form of things changes all the time. Safety, danger, control, panic, these and other labels constantly attach and detach themselves from places and people. When you emerge from such a space it stays with you, its otherness randomly imposes itself on the apparent stability of your peaceful home-town streets. What-if becomes the truth, you imagine buildings exploding in Gramercy Park, you see craters appear in the middle of Washington Square, and women carrying shopping bags drop dead on Delancey Street, bee-stung by sniper fire. You take pictures of your small patch of Manhattan and ghost images begin to appear in them, negative phantoms of the distant dead. Double exposure: like Kirlian photography, it becomes a new kind of truth. — Salman Rushdie

My books nourish my soul. When I open a cover and begin to read, I go to new places, to worlds I never knew existed. I time travel into the past and up into the distant future — Ann Hite

Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives - trying to go home again. And also like all men perhaps there'll be an occasion, maybe a summer night sometime, when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then too because he'll know it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory not too important really, some laughing ghosts that cross a man's mind, that are a part of the Twilight Zone. — Rod Serling

'Star Trek's insight lay in the promise of going to the stars together, with well-defined stereotypes who could supply the emotional frame for the potentially jarring truths of these distant places. — Gregory Benford

And there came to him a feeling which he had often had before in many different places--that he himself was a part of all this, the great, blind, wistful soul of mankind, which had been here before he was born and would be here when he was dead--still groping, yearning, struggling upward, on and on--to something distant as the sun. And still would he be part of it all, through the eager lives of his children. — Ernest Poole

Rather, the kingdom already exists in the King himself, and when he ascends, the whole world goes with him (John 12:32).
It is not that someday Jesus will do this, that, and the other thing, and then the Kingdom will come. It is not, for example, that at some future date the dead will rise or that in some distant consummation we will reign with him. Rather, it is that we have already been buried with him in baptism, and that we are already risen with him through faith in the operation of God who raised him from the dead, and that we are now - in this and every moment - enthroned together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
But — Robert Farrar Capon

A nomad I will remain for life,
in love with distant and uncharted places. — Isabelle Eberhardt

The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home ... — Italo Calvino

What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,' the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends: 'fleeting visions of the French countryside,' 'fragments of music and poetry,' in short, something like an 'uprooting in one's origins (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one's own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, or being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces. — Michel De Certeau

The modern airplane creates a new geographical dimension. A navigable ocean of air blankets the whole surface of the globe. There are no distant places any longer: the world is small and the world is one. — Wendell Willkie

In a relationship with God, our most secret places once thickly cloaked and meticulously hidden away now stand before us utterly and entirely exposed. And it may be that this dreaded fear is the single thing that keeps us an arm's length from God, and forever a single step away from His blessings. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

We accept it as normal that people who have never been on the land, who have no history or connection to the country, may legally secure the right to come in and, by the very nature of their enterprises, leave in their wake a cultural and physical landscape utterly transformed and desecrated. What's more, in granting such mining concessions, often initially for trivial sums to speculators from distant cities, companies cobbled together with less history than my dog, the government places no cultural or market value on the land itself. — Wade Davis

Whoever wishes to meet Jesus must meet him in places where brothers and sisters of Jesus are hungry, thirsty, naked, unwanted, sick or in prison. Whoever keeps himself distant from these places remains distant from Jesus. — Richard Wurmbrand

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now. — Octavio Paz

It is deeply interesting to notice also where the citizens were put to work. Each was set to labor on the bit of all opposite his home ... I do not say that men are not called to service in far distant places ... But I do say that for the vast majority the task that God appoints is the task lying at the door. The nearest thing is God's thing. The nearest duty is God's duty. He who cannot find his service there is little likely to be useful anywhere. — George H Morrison

There was part of me that wanted to see the world and travel to distant places, but I could only do it in my imagination, so I read ferociously and imagined things. — George R R Martin

A great stench will come from Lausanne, but they will not know its origin; they will put out all people from distant places, fire seen in the sky, a foreign nation defeated. — Nostradamus

Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were. — Garrison Keillor

I am sad and have a passion for unknown, distant places. I want to see the world. And I would love it, if I just had the chance to get away for a little while. But sadly, things aren't that easy; desire won't change a thing. — Abraham M. Alghanem

Why do you so earnestly seek
the truth in distant places?
Look for delusion and truth in the
bottom of your own heart. — Ryokan