Living Far Apart Quotes & Sayings

One of the great myths about war is that there is a ground zero, a center stage, where the terrible forces unleashed by it can be witnessed, recounted, and replayed like the launching of a rocket. War is a human activity far too large to be contained in the experience of a single reporter in a single place and time in any meaningful way. When it comes, it happens to everyone. Everything is in its path. Yet this is the allure of war reporting, the chance of acquiring some personal mother lode of truth to beam back to the living rooms of a waiting nation. The fear that comes from reporting on a war is as much a fear of missing this mother load as it is of being injured or killed in battle, and it sets reporters apart from the people who have to fight wars. Soldiers have their own agonies to think about as a battle approaches. Missing the war is not generally one of them. — John Hockenberry

Looking back on months and years of intimacy, to feel that your friend, while you still remember the moving words you exchanged, is yet growing distant and living in a world apart - all this is sadder far than partings brought by death. — Yoshida Kenko

[A]s moral philosophers through the ages have pointed out, a philosophy of living based on "Not everyone, just me!" falls apart as soon as one sees oneself from an objective standpoint as a person just like others. It is like insisting that "here," the point in space one happens to be occupying at the moment, is a special place in the universe. — Steven Pinker

It was a hurting tune, resigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind to say goodbye. — Kristin Cashore

I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. — H.P. Lovecraft

Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life? — Virginia Woolf

Her words knife through me and I want to scream at her. To tell her that I'm a fucking monster - that I'm going to make her life a living hell. I want to spit in her face and explain to her that I'm about to hurt her unbroken spirit - that I'll thrive on tearing it apart piece by motherfucking piece. "Don't — K. Webster

I'm living so far beyond my means that we may almost be said to be living apart. — Saki

Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler ... He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only I did ... Only I cracked, alone, later in the one place in our house where I knew I could go to be apart from the living and all that they cannot not do. — Philip Roth

What we must do is encourage a sea change in attitude, one that acknowledges that we are a part of the living world, not apart from it. — Sylvia Earle

The attempt to understand reality apart from that action of God in and upon reality means living in anabstraction; it means failing to live in reality and vacillating between the extremes of a servile attitude toward the status quo and a protest in principle against it. Only God's becoming human makes possible an action that is genuinely in accord with reality. The world remains world. But it only does so because God has taken care of it and declared it to be under God's rule. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The documents inbox138 described a world in which money was everything- not just the means of sustaining life but the purpose of living it. ... If that was how the old world worked--if that was all they really cared about--maybe it was better that it had fallen apart. Maybe it was inevitable — Dan Wells

First of all, I must make it clear that this girl does not know herself apart from the fact that she goes on living aimlessly. Were she foolish enough to ask herself 'Who am I?', she would fall flat on her face. For the question 'Who am I?' creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need? To probe oneself is to recognize that one is incomplete. — Clarice Lispector

I have never met the man I could despair of after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God. — Oswald Chambers

Anger is not the absence of love. Anger broke you apart. Love and anger wrap around each other and becomes one living thing inside your heart. — Lisa Unger

The good Jew is ritually observant and resists assimilation, in some sense living apart, never fitting comfortably into American or any other society. — Elliott Abrams

If I relaxed my body now, I'd fall apart. I've always lived like this, and it's the only way I know how to go on living. If I relaxed for a second, I'd never find my way back. — Haruki Murakami

Yet spiritual realizations often remain compartmentalized, apart from everyday life, or become used as a rationale for living in an impersonal or soulless way. That is why, if we are to live our realizations and bring them into this world, we also need to work on the vessel of spirit - our embodied humanity. Soulwork is the forging of this vessel ... If spiritual work brings freedom, soulwork brings integration. Both are necessary for a complete human life. — John Welwood

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind. — Catherine Drinker Bowen

All of us take offense to anyone who reaps the rewards of living in America without taking on the responsibilities of living in America. And undocumented immigrants who desperately want to embrace those responsibilities see little option but to remain in the shadows, or risk their families being torn apart. — Barack Obama

His life spells living. Your life or my life, apart from Him, spells death. — Ravi Zacharias

Anyone know any long-term couples living three time zones apart? — Amy Argetsinger

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. — Alexis De Tocqueville

You lost all interest in this world. You were disappointed and discouraged, and lost interest in everything. So you abandoned your physical body. You went to a world apart and you're living a different kind of life there. In a world that's inside you. — Haruki Murakami

A quarter-horse jockey learns to think of a twenty-second race as if it were occurring across twenty minutes
in distinct parts, spaced in his consciousness. Each nuance of the ride comes to him as he builds his race. If you can do the opposite with deep time, living in it and thinking in it until the large numbers settle into place, you can sense how swiftly the initial earth packed itself together, how swiftly continents have assembled and come apart, how far and rapidly continents travel, how quickly mountains rise and how quickly they disintegrate and disappear. — John McPhee

When you live as I do, you cannot indulge in jealousy. If you do, it will rip you apart. — David Levithan

Maybe that's what living in America does to you: it spreads you into far distances until you're just little bits rolling apart. — Marina Budhos

Here they found themselves year after year- a group of busy, youngish women who had eased their cars impatiently through the archaic streets of Rosedale, who had complained for a week previously about the time lost, the fuss over the children's dresses, and, above all, the boredom, but who were drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance- not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles's living room. — Alice Munro

History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes. — Karl Marx

That, to me, is the quintessential experience of living in the United States: constantly worrying whether or not the country is about to fall apart. — Sarah Vowell

They don't find peace. It's pure bullshit. When something unspeakable happens, or when you do something unspeakable, it changes you. It takes you apart and reassembles you. You are a Frankenstein of circumstance, and the parts never fit back quite right and the life you live is a stolen one. You don't deserve to walk among the living, and you know it. — Lisa Unger

Only in the last moment in history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world. — E. O. Wilson

Our Southside is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest. — Lorraine Hansberry

For years, i lived my life, waiting for the other shoe to drop ... i thought control was something i could have over my life. My goal was to live life, in such a way, that i would never again have to suffer any form of trauma or abuse that would remind me of my painful past. I was living life on a tightrope of tension. I was only happy when things went smoothly and came apart at the seams when i was thrown a curveball.
NOW, i realize, that the key to happiness is surrendering to the illusion of control. And to trust that, no matter what happens to me, i have the infinite inner-wisdom and strength to find my way through. — Jaeda DeWalt

Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man's reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why? — John D. MacDonald

I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago. That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people. They have no loyalty to anything apart from their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit - profits extracted at the cost of life. — Vandana Shiva

The real joy of life is in its play. Play is anything we do for the joy and love of doing it, apart from any profit, compulsion, or sense of duty. It is the real joy of living. — Walter Rauschenbusch

If we demand perfection from ourselves we are not living in the real world ... The inherent problem in the relationship between the ideal & the real is that the ideal judges the real as unacceptable and brings down condemnation and wrath on the real. This sets up an adversarial relationship between the two and like all adversaries, they move further and further apart. — Henry Cloud

The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn't be placed at my feet. The private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose. — Robert Charles Wilson

I thought I knew what love was, that I understood its depth, its importance, its beauty and the happiness and the heartache it brings." He huffed - a small sound of amusement. "I wasn't even close. When I look at you, I see radiance. I know pure happiness. Everything else pales in comparison. The thought of living a single moment without you tears me apart inside. Just when I think I love you as much as possible, you open your heart to me a little more, and my love expands - grows - wanting to fill every emptiness inside you. — Olivia Cunning

He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from circumstance. He and Patty couldn't live together and couldn't imagine living apart. Each time he thought they'd reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking. — Jonathan Franzen

Every word he wrote would be strong with that sweet purity and simplicity that was his gift alone, placing him higher than any living poet, secure on his pedestal apart from the world, like a great silent god above the little dwarfs of men tossed hither and thither in the stream of life. From the crystal clearness of his brain the images became words, and the words became magic, and the whole was transcendent of beauty, one thread touching another, alike in their perfection and their certitude of immortality. Thus it seemed to me he was not a living figure of flesh and blood, but a monument to the national pride of his country, his England, and now and then he would bow gravely from his pedestal and scatter to the people a small quantity of his thought, which they would grub for on their poor rough ground, then clasp to their hungry hearts as treasure. — Daphne Du Maurier

I find what I call the [bleep] side of the industry very difficult. You won't see me at other peoples' premiers. I mean, I go to my own premiers because I have to help my film, but I don't enjoy that whole side of it. I don't enjoy celebrityhood. I love getting a seat in a restaurant. I love it when people say hi when I don't know them. I mean, that's fine, but apart from that, I like the elements of celebrityhood which make living in the world like living in your own village. — Jeremy Irons

Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living. The night is cold and delicate and full of angels Pounding down the living. The factories are all lit up, The chime goes unheard. We are together at last, though far apart. - from "The Ecclesiast" by John Ashbery — Philip Pullman