Quotes & Sayings About Space And Distance

Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part
time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection. — Gail Caldwell

Sam came around the side of the car and stopped dead when he saw me. "Oh my God, what is THAT?" I used my thumb and middle finger to flick the multicolored pom-pom on top of my head. "In my language, we call it a HAT. It keeps my ears warm." "Oh my God," Sam said again, and closed the distance between us. He cupped my face in his hands and studied me. "It's horribly cute." He kissed me, looked at the hat, and then he kissed me again. I vowed never to lose the pom-pom hat. — Maggie Stiefvater

Conlan could not wrench his gaze away as the legionaries in the distance lost cohesion and closed in on each other, their formation compromised no space to fight, many on the front line turned to take flight. — Jason K. Lewis

I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune's orbit. Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae. Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surface - but who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon's touch. — Peter Watts

The facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

There are few things sadder in this life than watching someone walk away after they've left you. Watching the distance between your bodies expand until there's nothing but empty space and silence. — Laura Zigman

It is well to understand how empty space is. If, as we have said, the sun were a ball nine feet across, our earth would, in proportion, be the size of a one-inch ball, and at a distance of 323 yards from the sun. The moon would be a speck the size of a small pea, thirty inches from the earth. Nearer to the sun than the earth would be two other very similar specks, the planets Mercury and Venus, at a distance of 125 and 250 yards respectively. Beyond the earth would come the planets Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, at distances of 500, 1806, 3000, 6000, and 9500 yards respectively. — H.G.Wells

Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate. And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only science. — Mark Z. Danielewski

Bits have unique properties, then, that we can use to our advantage: they're super-small, super-fast, easily acquired and created and copied and shared in near-infinite quantity, protected from the ravages of time, and free from the limitations of distance and space. In practice, though, bits reveal several paradoxes: they're weightless, but they weigh us down; they don't take up any space, but they always seem to pile up; they're created in an instant, but they can last forever; they move quickly, but they can waste our time. — Mark Hurst

It took the mind of Albert Einstein, the twentieth century's most brilliant and influential, to show that we can more accurately describe gravity's action-at-a-distance as a warp in the fabric of space-time, produced by any combination of matter and energy. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Apparently she didn't know about that abomination of the senses in which cute boys can hear you speak their names from literally any distance in space and/or time. — Katie Heaney

Subject and object of consciousness cannot exist apart from each other. Without an object, the subject cannot be aware of anything. Mountains and rivers, earth and sun, all lie within the heart of consciousness. When that realization arises, time and space dissolve. Cause and effect, birth and death, all vanish. Though we dwell a hundred thousand light years from a star, we can cross that distance in a flash. The saints of the past can return to the present in a microsecond, their presence as vivid as a bright flame. — Thich Nhat Hanh

I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. 'Because I have a program for the treadmill,' she explained. 'It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.' It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard. — Bill Bryson

Looked into remote space, where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen. And such had European life, politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy seemed to him. But even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had penetrated to those distances and he had there seen the same pettiness, worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he had learned to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and therefore - to see it and enjoy its contemplation - he naturally threw away the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men's heads, and gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked the more tranquil — Leo Tolstoy

As I wandered around the room, with Sachiko by my side, I began to think how much we need space in those we love, space enough to accommodate growth and possibility. Knowledge must leave room for mystery; intimacy, taken too far, was the death of imagination. Keeping some little distance from her was, I thought, a way of keeping an open space, a silence for the imagination to fill.
"At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things," Thoreau had written, "we require that all things be mysterious and unexplainable. — Pico Iyer

The second best thing about space travel is that the distances involved make war very difficult, usually impractical, and almost always unnecessary. This is probably a loss for most people, since war is our race's most popular diversion, one which gives purpose and color to dull and stupid lives. But it is a great boon to the intelligent man who fights only when he must-never for sport. — Robert A. Heinlein

So the people of Earth thought they had instructions from the Creator of the Universe Himself to wreck the joint. But they were going at it too slowly for the Elders, so the Elders put it into the people's heads that they themselves were the life forms that were supposed to spread out through the Universe. This was a preposterous ideas, of course. In the words of a nameless author: How could all that meat, needing so much food and water and oxygen, and with bowel movements so enormous, expect to survive a trip of any distance whatsoever through the limitless void of outer space? It was a miracle that such ravenous and cumbersome giants could make a roundtrip for a 6-pack to the nearest grocery store. — Kurt Vonnegut

The distance between an honest Christian mystic and a fortune-teller is sometimes less than half a whisper. Less than a pot of tea or the space between two book covers. — Cherie Priest

There should be a little gap between you and your friends, though you'll miss their companionship and you'll also miss their disrespect. — Michael Bassey Johnson

Difficult is a far cry from impossible. The distance between these two lies hope. Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Invite one to stay. — Maya Angelou

There was only so much space between us, not even a real distance if measured in miles or feet or even inches, all the things that told you how far you'd come or had left to go. But it was a big space, if only for me. And as I moved forward to him covering it, he waited there on the other side. It was only the last little bit I has to go, but in the end, I knew it would be all I would truly remember. So as I kissed him, bringing this summer and everything else full circle, I let myself fall, and was not scared of the ground I knew would rise up to meet me. — Sarah Dessen

Instead, thoughts race, as if, in a mind devoid of memory, each idea has too much space to grow and move, to collide with others in a shower of sparks before spinning off into its own distance. I — S.J. Watson

It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. — Isaac Asimov

All of Shakespeare's plays were written under this law of censorship, which is why they are set in the past or in foreign countries, separated from the hot topics of Elizabethan and Jacobean England by the dramatic distance of time or space. — William Shakespeare

Great distance in either time or space has wonderful power to lull and render quiescent the human mind. — Abraham Lincoln

What is aura? A peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be. To follow, while reclining on a summer's noon, the outline of a mountain range on the horizon or a branch, which casts its shadow on the observer until the moment or the hour partakes of their presence - this is to breathe in the aura of these mountains, of this branch. Today, people have as passionate an inclination to bring things close to themselves or even more to the masses, as to overcome uniqueness in every situation by reproducing it. Every day the need grows more urgent to possess an object in the closest proximity, through a picture or, better, a reproduction. And the reproduction, as the illustrated newspaper and weekly readily prove, distinguishes itself unmistakably from the picture. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely intertwined in the latter as transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. — Walter Benjamin

We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they're watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they're not seeing you and me. They're watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs
people who don't know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that's quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin "Dear Sire," and congratulate us on the handsomness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us. — Bill Bryson

Research at the subatomic quantum level reveals an invisible connection between all particles and all members of a given species. This oneness is being demonstrated in remarkable scientific discoveries. The findings show that physical distance, what we think of as empty space, does not preclude a connection by invisible forces. Obviously there exist invisible connections between our thoughts and our actions. We do not deny this, even though the connection is impervious to our senses. — Wayne Dyer

I didn't know someone could love me like this," she said. "Could love me and love me and love me without ... needing space."
Lincoln wasn't asleep. He rolled on top of her.
"There's no air in space," he said. — Rainbow Rowell

Money is indispensable to a long-circuit heavy load energy system. It must be used when a sufficient surplus is being produced to allow a margin for exchange, and cost of transport, over a considerable distance. Money represents a storage battery when idle, and a generalized mode of the conversion of energy when it is in motion, with a function of equating time and space. — Isabel Paterson

The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us. — Philibert Joseph Roux

We are at the moment looking at space as something to be entered by the tremendous thrust of a rocket because that is the attitude of attacking the unknown. And that causes us not to realize that we are already on the most magnificently equipped spaceship, which could hardly be improved upon. It has got a source of temperature and energy just at the right distance from it. It's beautifully equipped with oxygen, with food supplies, with all kinds of delightful things to do while on the journey ... and it's traveling through space at a colossal speed ... and it's called the planet Earth. — Alan Watts

Nothing passes the time, or shortens the path, like a thought which engrosses all the faculties of an individual's organisation. Our external Existence is as a sleep, of which this thought is the dream; and. whilst we are subjected to its influence, time has no longer any measure, nor is there any distance in space: we leave one place, and arrive at another, and are conscious of nothing between. Of the intervening scenes, the only remembrance preserved, is somewhat akin to the idea of an indefinite mist, partially broken by obscure images of mountains, trees, and plains. — Alexandre Dumas

I can smell the ocean in the distance. The salt wraps around my body, making my skin feel tight, and already I want to shower. I can do big cities, and small cities, and the even the occasional mountaintop is cool. But oceans are ridiculous. They take up way too much space in this overcrowded world and are filled with creatures that have several sets of teeth, like one row of man-eating teeth isn't enough. And just to add insult to injury, all that water isn't even drinkable. If you ask me, the ocean is kind of a prick. — Victoria Scott

The great festival of Lughnasa was held at Carmun once every three years. The site of Carmun was eerie. In a land of wild forest and bog, it was an open grassy space that stretched, green and empty, halfway to the horizon. Lying some distance west of the point where, if you were following it upstream, the Liffey's course began to retreat eastwards on the way to its source in the Wicklow Mountains, the place was absolutely flat, except for some mounds in which ancestral chiefs were buried. The festival lasted a week. There were areas reserved for food and livestock markets, and another where fine clothes were sold; but the most important quarter was where a large racetrack was laid out on the bare turf. — Edward Rutherfurd

Believe me, I grow daily more convinced that the atmosphere is an inexhaustible source of countless beauties. It is up to we artists to learn, hour by hour, to penetrate itto understand about Distance, to know the Air and space, which is never still, but always vibrating and wiggling. The tiniest oscillation is, in itself, a motive for art - it is a new beauty: fluttering, creaking, disjointed, and buoyant. — Mario De Sa-Carneiro

With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary - the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation. — Edwin Powell Hubble

They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve around Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five: the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half, so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distances from the center of Mars; which evidently shews them to be governed by the same Law of Gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies. — Jonathan Swift

Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time. — Colm Toibin

Distance: the space between my
heart & my body.

The night called and said, 'find
your way out now', and I'm trying.

I'm still trying. — Darshana Suresh

To me, no painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon. The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claims to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West indispensable to anyone who would understand it. — Thomas McGuane

European civilisation finds it easier to tolerate differ-
ent ways of life precisely on account of what its critics
usually denounce as its weakness and failure, namely
the alienation of social life. One of the things alienation
means is that distance is woven into the very social texture of everyday life. Even if I live side by side with others, in my normal state I ignore them. I am allowed not to get too close to others. I move in a social space where I interact with others obeying certain external "mechanical" rules, without sharing their inner world. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that sometimes a dose of alienation is indispensable for peaceful coexistence. Sometimes alienation is not a problem but a solution. — Slavoj Zizek

There were no witnesses to what was about to happen. 'Happen' didn't yet exist. Reality was timeless. Space also didn't exist. The distance between two points was immeasurable. The points themselves could be anywhere, hovering and bouncing. Infinity tangled into itself. There was no here and now. Only Being. — Marcelo Gleiser

Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space - in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be 'harassed', that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others. — Slavoj Zizek

This Arthur Dent," comes the cry from the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a mysterious deep space probe thought to originate from an alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, "what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck? — Douglas Adams

There's a reason why stars can only exist in the sky
they're just rockets of light traveling through space, so it feels right to admire their form from a distance. People, solid and living and breathing together in the same world, are not meant to be surround by that much darkness. — Katie Kacvinsky

The computer is usually seen as a solely beneficial invention, which liberates human fantasy and facilitates efficient design work. I wish to express my serious concern in this respect, at least considering the current role of the computer in education and the design process. Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in a haptic contact with the object, or space. In our imagination, the object is simultaneously held in the hand and inside the head, and the imagined and projected physical image is modelled by our embodied imagination. We are inside and outside of the conceived object at the same time. — Juhani Pallasmaa

Only one in five children in the U.S. lives within walking distance of a park. Many more lack access to a quality early childhood education that provides ample time and space to play. — Darell Hammond

It is going to be necessary that everything that happens in a finite volume of space and time would have to be analyzable with a finite number of logical operations. The present theory of physics is not that way, apparently. It allows space to go down into infinitesimal distances, wavelengths to get infinitely great, terms to be summed in infinite order, and so forth; and therefore, if this proposition [that physics is computer-simulatable] is right, physical law is wrong. — Richard P. Feynman

But from this distance, the velvety reds, flashing yellows and glassy whites [of the roses] seemed to break up the light of the summer sun into its various elements and cast it back far more brilliantly than any other flower ever could, seemed not exactly of the earth, but of space and air itself. — Jane Smiley

Observe that the body of man is confined to a small place; it covers only two spans of earth. But the spirit and mind of man travel to all countries and regions - even through the limitless space of the heavens - surround all that exists, and make discoveries in the exalted spheres and infinite distances. This is because the spirit has no place; it is placeless; and for the spirit the earth and the heaven are as one since it makes discoveries in both. — Abdu'l- Baha

I have kept thee long in waiting, dear Romuald, and thou mayst well have thought that I had forgotten thee. But I have come from a long distance and from a place from which no one has ever before returned; there is neither moon nor sun in the country from which I come; there is naught but space and shadow; neither road nor path; no ground for the foot, no air for the wing; and yet here I am, for love is stronger than death, and it will end by vanquishing it. Ah! what gloomy faces and what terrible things I have seen in my journeying! What a world of trouble my soul, returned to this earth by the power of my will, has had in finding its body and reinstating itself therein! What mighty efforts I had to put forth before I could raise the stone with which they had covered me! See! the palms of my poor hands are all blistered from it. Kiss them to make them well, dear love! — Theophile Gautier

I work out of silence, because silence makes up for my actual lack of working space. Silence substitutes for actual space, for psychological distance, for a sense of privacy and intactness. In this sense silence is absolutely necessary. — Radka Donnell

I cannot seriously believe in it [quantum theory] because the theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance [spukhafte Fernwirkungen]. — Albert Einstein

I know there is a terrible distance between us. But our bodies are made of stardust, and we are hurtling through space and time, toward the most beautiful collision. — Lang Leav

And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime. — Karl Ove Knausgard

My senses of space, of distance, and of direction entirely vanished. When I looked for the ground I sometimes looked down, sometimes up, sometimes left, sometimes right. I thought I was very high up when I would suddenly be thown to earth in a near vertical spin. I thought I was very low to the ground and I was pulled up to 3,000 feet in two minutes by the 500-horsepower motor. It danced, it pushed, it tossed ... Ah! la la! — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

I've been thinking a lot about space. It was one of those slow-motion realisations how little we are, how far we are from everything else in our solar system. This idea of distance started kind of haunting me. How do you go forth and accomplish things but not end up leaving everything you started out with in the dust? — Regina Spektor

Standing is symbolic of life itself,
Open space is just a distance between you and someone else — Mira Midha

People in danger typically try to put as much distance as possible between them and their attacker. They believe that space equals safety. But they are wrong, and often get hurt as a result. You see, when your enemies are close, when their bodies are pressed flush against yours, at that range they can do very little damage. They need distance to swing a punch, to extend their hands and choke your neck. Distance to reach down and unzip a zipper. The lesson is simple: Dictate your space. Keep your enemies as close as possible until you are ready to give them space. And when you give them that space, use it to destroy them. — Alessandra Torre

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

Treasure of my soul," he said. He took one of her hands, brought it to his lips, and kissed it, just above the knuckles, as he had been doing every night for the last month, since their engagement. "You have brought me such peace."
"Ambrose," she replied, amazed by his name, amazed by his face.
"It is in our sleep that we most closely glimpse the power of the spirit," he said. "Our minds will speak across this narrow distance. It will be here, together in nocturnal stillness, that we shall finally become unbound by time, by space, by natural law and physical law. We shall roam the world however we like, in our dreams. We shall speak with the dead, transform into animals and objects, fly across time. Our intellects shall be nowhere to be found, and our minds will be unfettered."
"Thank you," she said, senselessly. — Elizabeth Gilbert

All space is relative. There is no such thing as size. The telescope and the microscope have produced a deadly leveling of great and small, far and near. The only little thing is sin, the only great thing is fear!
("The Jelly-Fish") — David H. Keller

We live and we love and we hurt each other. We don't always say the right thing, or do the right thing at the right moment. Sometimes we need space, and distance, and sometimes words fall from our lips that shouldn't have been said. [ ... ] And we always hurt the ones we love most. If we didn't love so love so much, it wouldn't hurt so much. — Lauren Blakely

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

The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register. — Eugene Ionesco

Some primary reasons that both Plato and Aristotle had for believing in God were utterly erroneous - simple errors caused by our being stuck to the planet and misled by the sensation that the planet is standing still. If they had been aware that the Earth spins, they would have understood that, by and large, we are making our own light show in the night sky. As it was, the precision of the movements of all the stars seemed astonishing. If we knew how we lined up among the planets, their motion would not seem so strange and willful. Also, had the philosophers been able to leave planet Earth for a jaunt in outer space, they could have seen that, at a distance from gravity and atmosphere, moving things tend to keep moving, without any need for an impelling force. From out there, the motion of the planets would seem natural as well. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

Crossing over mountains, rivers, arid oceans, setting at naught, as it were, the obstacles of the distance of space and time, the blood of Indian thought has flowed, and is still flowing into the veins of other nations of the globe, whether in a distinct or in some subtle unknown way. Perhaps to us belongs the major portion of the universal ancient inheritance. — Swami Vivekananda

And the distance between them, millimeters only, the space of a breath, opened up and deepened, became a cavern at whose edge he stood. — Kim Edwards

The lost self: With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world is wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance - so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly. — Walker Percy

Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing. — Eugene H. Peterson

The principal reason for the universe's poker face is that its constituents are far away. Stars careen through space, and galaxies spin at speeds thousands of times faster than a jet plane. But given their distance, you'd need the patience of Job to notice much change in their appearance or position. — Seth Shostak

Don't scrutinize people with a microscope; view them from a comfortable distance. And allow some room for compassion in the space the lies between you. — Douglas Pagels

If food was no longer obliged to make intercontinental journeys, but stayed part of a system in which it can be consumed over short distances, we would save a lot of energy and carbon dioxide emissions. And just think of what we would save in ecological terms without long-distance transportation, refrigeration, and packaging
which ends up on the garbage dump anyway
and storage, which steals time, space, and vast portions of nature and beauty. — Carlo Petrini

The way of the superior man may be compared to what takes place in traveling, when to go to a distance we must first traverse the space that is near, and in ascending a height, when we must begin from the lower ground. — Confucius

At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, all we really want is to be close to somebody. So this thing where we all keep our distance and pretend not to care about each other, it's usually a load of bull. So we pick and choose who we want to remain close to, and once we've chosen those people, we tend to stick close by. No matter how much we hurt them. The people that are still with you at the end of the day, those are the ones worth keeping. And sure, sometimes close can be too close. But sometimes, that invasion of personal space, it can be exactly what you need. — Shonda Rhimes

We were still so young when our eyes first met. We would run holding hands through the lawn of the college campus. I vividly remember the grass beneath the cherry tree that had water at the tip which touched our legs. I vividly remember how we would talk about our future as the sun rays sparkled like diamonds through the leaves of the trees outside the campus auditorium. I vividly remember your urge to touch my erratic strands in the gentle breeze outside the canteen. And then we allowed distance to conquer the space between us so we could build a career, sculpt a life and keep the promises. And did we not do well! — Debalina Haldar

His were always lighthearted notes from the places they'd visited, scrawled in the limited space on the back of the cards, whereas hers tended to be longer and slightly rambling, unrestricted by the confines of paper. But sitting there with the cursor blinking at him, he wasn't sure what to say. There was something too immediate about an e-mail, the idea that she might get it in mere moments, that just one click of the mouse would make it appear on her screen in an instant, like magic. He realized how much he preferred the safety of a letter, the physicality of it, the distance it had to cross on its way from here to there, which felt honest and somehow more real. — Jennifer E. Smith

Distance yourself from negative people who try to lower your motivation and decrease your ambition. Create space for positive people to come into your life. Surround yourself with positive people who believe in your dreams, encourage your ideas, support your ambitions, and bring out the best in you. — Roy Bennett

Our ultimate analysis of space leads us not to a "here" and a "there," but to an extension such as that which relates "here" and "there." To put the conclusion rather crudely-space is not a lot of points close together; it is a lot of distances interlocked. — Arthur Eddington

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part
time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection. — Gail Caldwell

The fields stretch out in long unbroken rows.
We walk aware of what is far and close.
Here distance is familiar as a friend.
The feud we kept with space comes to an end. — Theodore Roethke

He envisaged her in the heaven he had learned about in childhood: a grassy place with blue sky and a light breeze. He could no longer picture the inhabitants with anything as ridiculous as wings. Instead he saw Nancy strolling in a simple sheath dress, her low shoes held in her hand and a shady tree beckoning her in the distance. The rest of the time, he could not hold on to this vision and she was only gone, like Bertie, and he was left to struggle on alone in the awful empty space of unbelief. — Helen Simonson

Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade ... I live in great density ... Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage ... In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities. — Gaston Bachelard

The Earth is cylindrical, three times as wide as it is deep, and only the upper part is inhabited. But this Earth is isolated in space, and the sky is a complete sphere in the center of which is located, unsupported, our cylinder, the Earth, situated at an equal distance from all the points of the sky. — Anaximander

To her
Even endless expanding distance of time space and matter is not enough to tell you how I feel. It is there inside the mysterious identity we call soul. — Sameh Elsayed

Miles watched the evening shadows flowing up along the backbone of the Dendarii range, high and massive in the distance. How small those mountains looked from space! Little wrinkles on the skin of a globe he could cover with his hand, all their crushing mass made invisible. Which was illusory, distance or nearness? Distance, Miles decided. Distance was a damned lie. Had his father known this? Miles suspected so. — Lois McMaster Bujold

The outstanding feature, however, is the possibility that the velocity-distance relation may represent the de Sitter effect, and hence that numerical data may be introduced into discussions of the general curvature of space. — Edwin Powell Hubble

To understand one's world, one must sometimes turn away from it! To serve better, one must briefly hold it at a distance. Where can the necessary solitude be found, the long breathing space in which mind gathers its strength and takes stock of its courage. — Albert Camus

From this distance, in the dimness, the model looked surreal, made up of parts filled with buildings, bordered by long stretches of empty space. It reminded me of the way cities and towns look when you are flying at night. You can't make out much. But the places where people have come together, and stayed, are collections of tiny lights, breaking up the darkness. — Sarah Dessen

I have a seven-level program and through even into the fifth level it can be all done from a distance. "Why not?" is how I feel about it, because energy is not confined by time or space, so why should my teaching be. I'm teaching energy and how to manage it, how to handle it, and how to heal with it. — Deborah King

At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. — Henry David Thoreau

Distance and antiquity (the emphases of space and time) pull on our hearts. If we are already sobered by the thought that men lived two thousand five hundred years ago, how could we not be moved to know that they made verses, were spectators of the world, that they sheltered in light, lasting words something of their ponderous, fleeting life, words that fulfill a long destiny? — Jorge Luis Borges

Coneybeare didn't put his cigarette out. He merely let it slip from between his long fingers, and it fell down the space between the stairs. Barnes watched, dismayed at the distance, as the red ember disappeared in the darkness, and then, like Coneybeare, he did the same, dropping his cigarette and counting one one thousand, two one thousand, as it fell, a disappearing red dot in the darkness below. — Joseph G. Peterson

The fact had become as invisible to him as someone on Earth thinking about being held to a spinning celestial object by nothing more than mass, shielded from the fusion reaction of the sun by only distance and air. — James S.A. Corey

Looking out on the second day of our mission, I became aware that in the far distance, there was a distinctive-looking star. It stood out because, while all the other stars stayed exactly the same size and shape, this one got bigger and bigger as we got closer to it. At some point it stopped being a point of light and started becoming something three-dimensional, morphing into a strange bug-like thing with all kinds of appendages. And then, isolated against this inky background, it started to look like a small town.
Which is in fact what it is: an outpost that humans have built, far from Earth. The International Space Station. It's every science fiction book come true, every little kid's dream realized: a large, capable, fully human creation orbiting up in the universe.
And it felt miraculous that soon we'd be docked there, and the next phase of our expedition would begin. — Chris Hadfield

If you're ever if you're ever thinking, "Oh, but I'm a waste of space and I'm a burden," remember: that also describes the Grand Canyon. Why don't you have friends and family take pictures of you from a safe distance? Revel in your majestic profile? — Maria Bamford

Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance. — Walter Isaacson

Yet this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now. — John Fowles

Heracles was strangely silent. What is he thinking? / Geryon wondered. / Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts. / Even when they were lovers / he had never known what Herakles was thinking. Once in a while he would say, / Penny for your thoughts! / and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish / he'd eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago. / What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them / developed a dangerous cloud. — Anne Carson