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81 " I think of an old sermon my grandfather quoted from time to time— something about not looking back when you’re plowing a field, but instead finding a mark in the distance and focusing on that. Otherwise, the rows won’t come out straight. "
― Lisa Wingate , The Tidewater Sisters (Carolina Heirlooms #1.5)
82 " My heart was full and uplifted; it seemed that in my soul the question arose whether such things as Art, literature, science encompassed and completed life or whether there was still something in the distance which encompassed it even more completely and filled it with a far greater happiness. "
― Adalbert Stifter , Indian Summer
83 " The orange turns to dull bronze light and continues to show what it has shown all day long, but now it seems to show it without enthusiasm. Across those dry hills, within those little houses in the distance are people who've been there all day long, going about the business of the day, who now find nothing unusual or different in this strange darkening landscape, as we do. If we were to come upon them early in the day they might be curious about us and what we're here for. but now in the evening they'd just resent our presence. The workday is over. It's time for supper and family and relaxation and turning inward at home. We ride unnoticed down this empty highway through this strange country I've never seen before, and now a heavy feeling of isolation and loneliness becomes dominant and my spirits wane with the sun. "
― Robert M. Pirsig , Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1)
84 " I find that when I get casual in my relationships with divinity and when it seems that no divine ear is listening and no divine voice is speaking, that I am far, far away. If I immerse myself in the scriptures the distance narrows and the spirituality returns. I find myself loving more intensely those whom I must love with all my heart and mind and strength, and loving them more, I find it easier to abide their counsel. "
― Spencer W. Kimball
85 " I looked around for that welcoming light I'd heard about, but I didn't see it. Instead, everything around me seemed to glow and shimmer in the sunlight. I heard beautiful sounds-not the voices of dead loved ones, but the laughter and singing of my children when they were tiny. I saw James, young and shirtless, chasing them through Mama's garden. Off in the distance I saw Barbara Jean and Clarice, and even myself when we were kids, dancing to music pouring out of my old pink and violet portable record player. Here I was with my fingers brushing up against the frame of the picture I'd been painting for the last fifty-five years, and my beautiful, scarred husband, my happy children, and my laughing friends were right there with me. "
86 " I'm out, surrounded in dark. But in the distance there is a small glow, a tiny light. Suddenly I'm standing alone, the space starting to brighten as the light grows. "
― Suzanne Young , A Need So Beautiful (A Need So Beautiful, #1)
87 " The 'Dance of Love' is much more of a dialogue, one takes the lead and the other follows. One dictates a step and the other carries it out. One determines the direction, the other determines the distance travelled in a given figure. One sets the pace, the other reveals the grace. One understands the language of the other and knows what is coming next. The one leading leads with love and respect; never seeing the follower as being weak or inferior. And in the same manner, the one following follows with Trust and Submission; never feeling too big to be led or scared to jump. There is a blind assurance that someone is there to catch. "
― Olaotan Fawehinmi
88 " God is the distance between light and darkness. "
―
89 " Will. For a moment her heart hesitated. She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that, like the sound of Jem's violin music, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent. "
― Cassandra Clare , Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)
90 " She loved beyond measure, When I was young I thought her cold. But in time I came to understand that she was too tender for the world she’d been born into,” I said. Sorrow gave Dalia an iron gift. Behind that hard shelter, sheloved boundlessly in the distance and privacy of her solitude, safe fromthe tragic rains of her fate. "
― Susan Abulhawa , Mornings in Jenin
91 " I used to think grief was grey and spacious and insubstantial, like a damp fog that surrounds you on every side, one that you can't get away from because it colours the air, and you breathe it in and out, and it has its own earthy smell that seeps into your ores. I thought of grief as a fleeting thing like fog, like a damp that eventually disperses. One day the greyness is slightly lighter; after a few weeks the damp no longer collects on your skin, the musty smell diminishes, somewhere in the distance a pale sun flashes from between tatters of mist, and the grief dissolves into melancholy and then memory. Never, not for a moment, did I think that grief could be as hard as a dagger, sharp and unrelenting. That it could strike again and again, always unexpected, hard, straight between my ribs, bright lights in my eyes, black and violet and pain so big that I gasp and stagger. I forget the dagger sometimes for a few moments, perhaps an hour, and that's the very worst--the stroke of the blade takes me by surprise, still just as hard, cruel, painful. "
― Johanna Sinisalo , Enkelten verta
92 " …life is as fragile as a butterfly win and we must carry it lightly. Sometimes it will sit happily in our hands, sometimes it will fly away from us, but in the end---no matter the distance or the complications in between---the things we truly care for will always come back to us. "
― Hazel Gaynor , The Girl from the Savoy
93 " If someone were to propose that the planets go around the sun because all planet matter has a kind of tendency for movement, a kind of motility, let us call it an ‘oomph,’ this theory could explain a number of other phenomena as well. So this is a good theory, is it not? No. It is nowhere near as good as the proposition that the planets move around the sun under the influence of a central force which varies exactly inversely as the square of the distance from the center. The second theory is better because it is so specific; it is so obviously unlikely to be the result of chance. It is so definite that the barest error in the movement can show that it is wrong; but the planets could wobble all over the place, and, according to the first theory, you could say, ‘Well, that is the funny behavior of the ‘oomph. "
― Richard P. Feynman , The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist
94 " The structural similarity of men, and their ability to be represented both as ideal, like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, and as average. Man being the measure of all things, and therefore a sort of standard and interchangeable unit of length, breadth, intelligence, emotion. We could lay them end to end to measure the distance between the continents, the distance to the moon. We could use them to calculate the weight of weather, or to buy things at the grocery. With such an abundance of men, we could gauge anything we chose. "
― Alexandra Kleeman , Intimations: Stories
95 " I'm impressed when men go the distance to show they give a damn. That says nothing about the woman and everything about the man. "
― Donna Lynn Hope
96 " To be a full-blooded hillbilly was to be a living koan. Half of you wanted to be dignified and half of you couldn’t tolerate any restraint. You could see it in the regional art and hear it in the music. Wood carving with chainsaws. Cloggers who danced up a storm with the lower half of their bodies, but held the upper half perfectly still and stared off into the distance stone-faced. Or a group of bluegrass musicians who’d be playing the most raucous tunes imaginable, looking around at each other with bemused expressions that seemed to say where’s all that racket comin from?Phoebe believed that nearly all the adult males everywhere were pretty much the same way. Most of them could manage to keep the top half of themselves under a semblance of control, but the bottom half tended to run wild. As she continued to descend the trail she couldn’t help but think that most men were mentally ill below the waist. "
― Carolyn Jourdan , Out on a Limb: A Smoky Mountain Mystery
97 " She hesitated. " You know I'm older than you, right?" Richard stared down at her and forced himself not to laugh at the irony. He may be over two hundred years old, but he looked as if he were in his late twenties, thirty at the most. And Jenna was worried that her being thirty-seven would be a problem?A hint of insecurity entered her features. " I don't mean to press this, but... I dated a guy once--- very briefly---who said the same thing until his friends found out and started to razz him about it. I'm thirty-seven. Are you sure that isn't a problem?" " I don't know why his friends would tease him about dating you unless they were envious. You look like you're in your twenties, Jenna. Not much older than your son, in fact. And, if you looked like you were in your forties, guess what. I would be just as interested." She smiled and closed the distance between them. " And if I looked like I were in my fifties?" " Still interested." " Sixties?" " I happen to think laugh lines are hot. "
98 " This thought, this truth, it highlighted the distance between us. We lived in different timeframes. A reminder that, even right now, we didn't share the same moments. We could never truly be together. "
― P.I. Alltraine , Heartbound
99 " At dusk in the Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica, Melissa Overton barely heard the constant sound of crickets chirping all around them. Prowling through the dense, tropical rainforest as a jaguar, she listened for the human voices that would clue her in that her prey was nearby. Waves crashed onto the sandy beaches in the distance as she made her way quietly, like a phantom predator, through the tangle of vines and broad, leafy foliage, searching for any sign of the poachers. Humans wouldn't have a clue as to what she and her kind were when they saw her - apparently nothing other than an ordinary jaguar. And she and her fellow jaguar shifters planned to keep it that way. Her partner on this mission, JAG agent Huntley Anderson, was nearby, just as wary and observant. The JAG Special Forces Branch, also known as the Golden Claws, was only open to jaguar shifters and served to protect both their shifter kind and their jaguar cousins.... "
― Terry Spear , Jaguar Pride (Heart of the Jaguar, #4)
100 " He would never forget her. The distance he forced had done nothing to soothe his aching soul. It had done nothing to diminish that she was his. He tried to deny it at first, thinking it nothing more than a cosmic mistake, but after a month without a glimpse of her, there was no question.She belonged to him. "
― J.L. Sheppard , Burdened by Desire (Elemental Sisters, #2)