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1 " We're born with a mapped-out route. This one, not that one. Who you dream with. Who you love. It's one or the other. You choose without choosing. That's how it is. Each of us travels on their own path. Besides, how do you love someone without truly knowing who they are? How do you travel that distance when there's all that you don't know about the other? "
― Susana Fortes , Waiting for Robert Capa
2 " I see nobody on the road,' said Alice'I only wish I had such eyes,' The King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light! "
3 " For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.“Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world. "
― Rebecca Solnit , A Field Guide to Getting Lost
4 " O, the sorrow of us all,to wander the earth in a shell.And looking to the heavens,we lay to rest in hell.The suffering of the innocentin the midst of Jacob’s well.How the miles fled between us,and that distance is still great.Though on the same shore we now sit,in temporal quietude to wait.The moon is our bright witness;it will lead us to the gate. "
― Craig Froman , An owl on the moon: A journal from the edge of darkness
5 " In the first movement, our infancy as a species, we felt no separation from the natural world around us. Trees, rocks, and plants surrounded us with a living presence as intimate and pulsing as our own bodies. In that primal intimacy, which anthropologists call " participation mystique," we were as one with our world as a child in the mother's womb.Then self-consciousness arose and gave us distance on our world. We needed that distance in order to make decisions and strategies, in order to measure, judge and to monitor our judgments. With the emergence of free-will, the fall out of the Garden of Eden, the second movement began -- the lonely and heroic journey of the ego. Nowadays, yearning to reclaim a sense of wholeness, some of us tend to disparage that movement of separation from nature, but it brought us great gains for which we can be grateful. The distanced and observing eye brought us tools of science, and a priceless view of the vast, orderly intricacy of our world. The recognition of our individuality brought us trial by jury and the Bill of Rights.Now, harvesting these gains, we are ready to return. The third movement begins. Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again -- and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy. "
6 " Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me. "
― Wendell Berry , Hannah Coulter
7 " 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. "