In The Distance Quotes

Jem always said that Will rushed toward the end of a mission rather than proceeding in a measured manner, and that one must look at the next step on the path ahead, rather than the destination in the distance, or one would never reach one's goal. Will closed his eyes for a moment. He knew that Jem was right, but it was hard to remember, when the goal that he sought was the girl that he loved.
- Cassandra Clare

Her grandmother used to tell her that a pink sky meant someone in the distance had just fallen in love...
- Sarah Addison Allen

Up in the distance the whistle of the wind sang to her from the mountain. From Lucian's mountain. It beckoned and taunted and she wanted to run towards it. To be enveloped in its coat of fleece and to hear its safe sounds.
- Melina Marchetta

Out in the distance I could hear an animal wailing as though the air curled around the sound and flipped it around.
- Denise Baer

For the cause that lacks assistance, the wrong that needs resistance, for the future in the distance, and the good that I can do.
- George Linnaeus Banks

Sorrows are like thunderclouds, in the distance they look black, over our heads scarcely gray.
- Jean Paul

The people I see from my window. In the huts, in the distance. They're all dressed the same.' 'Ah, those people,' said Father, nodding his head and smiling slightly. 'Those people...well, they're not people at all, Bruno.' Bruno frowned. 'They're not?' he asked, unsure what Father meant by that.
- John Boyne

In the distance, he could see Molly lying in the tall grass off to the side of the house.
- Nicholas Sparks

The dark shadow we seem to see in the distance is not really a mountain ahead, but the shadow of the mountain behind - a shadow from the past thrown forward into our future. It is a dark sludge of historical sectarianism. We can leave it behind us if we wish.
- David Trimble

Gabriel squeezed his eyes shut. In the distance he heard Shay screamin his name. What had he done?
The answer slammed into his mind. He had fallen in love with her. It had clouded his judgment.
He loved her, heart, soul, and body. And he had sentenced her to death.
- Laura J Burns

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
- Albert Einstein

Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
- Albert Einstein

Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.
- Italo Calvino

Artists are visionaries. We routinely practice a form of faith, seeing clearly and moving toward a creative goal that shimmers in the distance - often visible to us, but invisible to those around us.
- Julia Cameron

To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves.
- Carrie Chapman Catt

basis, n.
There has to be a moment at the beginning when you wonder whether you're in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself.
If the moment doesn't pass, that's it - you're done.
And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it's even there when you thought you were searching for something else, like an escape route, or your lover's face.
- David Levithan

Here we slept," she says.
And he adds, "Kisses without number."
"Waking in the morning -"
"Silver between the trees -"
"Upstairs -"
"In the garden -"
"When summer came -"
"In winter snowtime -"
The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.
- Virginia Woolf

You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that wasn't made for them by navigating a playground that was.
- John Green

During the long stretches of quiet two-lane highway, with the sun
setting in the distance, it was
somehow easier to say things aloud, and regardless of what was said, we just
kept moving toward that
horizon.
- Sarah Dessen

In the distance I see a lighthouse. The light washes over us and continues on its rotation. This time, I don't know where the light will guide us.
- Lauren Destefano

The hills in the distance held my life in a bowl filled with everything I could possibly want.
- Anita Diamant

Away in the distance, a train appeared behind the trees, all its compartments were lit, the windows were sure to be open. One of us started singing a ballad, but we all wanted to sing. We sang far quicker than the speed of the train, we swung our arms because our voices weren't enough, our voices got into a tangle where we felt happy. If you mix your voice with others' voices, you feel as though you're caught on a hook. (trans. Michael Hofmann)
- Franz Kafka

Over the green squares of the fields and the low curves of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance like some fantastic landscape in a dream. Baskerville sat for a long time, his gaze fixed upon it, and I read upon his eager face how much it meant to him, this first sight of that strange spot where the men of his blood had held sway so long and left their mark so deep.
- Arthur Conan Doyle

A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.
- Howard Fast

We were going to the long field which today looked like an ocean, although I had never seen an ocean; the grass was moving in the breeze and the cloud shadows passed back and forth and the trees in the distance moved.
- Shirley Jackson

I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up to him.
- Jonathan Safran Foer

Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted.
- Jonathan Safran Foer

So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars.
- Ford Madox Ford

Elephants, it turns out, are surprisingly stealthy. As the sunlight fades, other species declare their presence. Throngs of zebras and wildebeests thunder by in the distance, trailing dust clouds. Cape buffalo snort and raise their horns and position themselves in front of their young. Giraffes stare over treetops, their huge brown eyes blinking, then lope away in seeming slow motion. But no elephants.
- Thomas French

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker.
- Neil Gaiman

I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all.
- Sylvia Plath

The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all.
- Sylvia Plath

And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.
- Mark Haddon

The sirens in the distance were growing louder. Although it was the music of his neighbourhood, he knew the pigs would soon be performing in his dead-end street.
- Marita A Hansen

I look to the right as I cross the bridge and smile to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower soaring over rooftops in the distance on the other side of the river. I've seen it in photographs a thousand times, but seeing it in person for the first time that reminds me that I'm really, truly here, thousands of miles away, across an ocean from home.
- Kristin Harmel

Yeah', said Fats. 'Fucking and dying. That's it, innit? Fucking and dying. That's life.'
'Trying to get a fuck and trying not to die.'
'Or trying to die', said Fats. 'Some people. Risking it.'
'Yeah, Risking it.'

'Ans music', said Andrew quietly, watching the blue smoke hanging beneath the dark rock.
'Yeah', said Fats, in the distance. 'And music.
- J K Rowling

The kind of pace that you want to use in a Western - just to acknowledge the land in the distance that everyone has to travel, and the way things develop sort of slowly - it's almost the antithetical of what's currently going on in the movies, you know.
- Lawrence Kasdan

He had the innate sense that something bad was just around the bend, but a hope that something incredible was waiting in the distance.
It had to be.
His burning love for her cursed through him until he felt so full he didn't know whether he would fit through the portal.
- Lauren Kate

The city buildings in the distance are holding up the sky, it seems.
- Markus Zusak

Always in the dream, it seemed as if there were a destination: a something--he could not grasp what-that lay beyond the place where the thickness of snow brought the sled to a stop. He was left, upon awakening, with the feeling that he wanted, even somehow needed, to reach the something that waited in the distance. The feeling that it was good. That it was welcoming. That it was significant. But he did not know how to get there.
- Lois Lowry

A man was coming down the road driving a donkey piled high with firewood. In the distance the churchbells had begun. The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of the claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transiencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.
- Cormac Mccarthy

Have you ever, on a cloudless night, looked down from a passing aircraft flying over Canada? Endless, glowing strings of cities, towns, and homesteads. Stretching on and on, one province to the next. With only the stars in the distance.
- Paul Martin

At a certain stage in his evolution, man himself had been able to lay hold upon a higher order of things, which raised him above the level of the beasts that perish, and enabled him to see, at least in the distance, the shining towers of the City of God.
- Alfred Noyes

Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. "Help, help!" he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.
- Flannery O Connor

My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.
- Lauren Oliver

The desert could not be claimed or owned it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East... All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.
- Michael Ondaatje

You come out; it is still dark. The door creaks, or perhaps you sneeze, or the snow crunches under your foot, and hares start up from the far cabbage patch and leap away, leaving the snow criss-crossed with tracks. In the distance dogs begin to howl and it takes a long time before the quieten down. The cocks have finished their crowing and have nothing left to say. Then dawn breaks.
- Boris Pasternak

It's time to serve my Master. He says, pointing at some steamy thing in the distance. If his master is some type of steam, all I gotta do is get a vacuum and sweep his ass up.
- Nandanie Phalgoo

Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Overhead, the glass envelope of the Insomnia Balloon is malfunctioning. It blinks on and off at arrhythmic intervals, making the world go gray:black, gray:black. In the distance, a knot of twisted trees flashes like cerebral circuitry.
- Karen Russell

When I reach the end of one row, I continue straight on away from the barn and the farm and the road. I walk until I come to a pile of hay bales and plop myself down. The sun is bright and the air is sharp. In the distance I hear the lowing of cows. It's so peaceful here.
"Merry Christmas, " I whisper to myself. "Merry Christmas, Nate.
- Lisa Ann Sandell

Amie blinked through the haze of her thoughts and the constant drum of the rains. A golden light swung back and forth in the distance like a pendulum and every second drew closer. Finally, Amie could tell it wasn't a faerie light but a lantern, carried by a small green-cloaked person.
- Jennifer Silverwood

In the distance, they could see the headlights from cars crossing the bridges like fireflies swarming the streets toward home.
- Abby Slovin

All of a sudden we saw a high, round tower in the distance, on a little hill. Father instantly decided that we must explore it, though mother wasn't enthusiastic. It was difficult to find because the little roads twisted and woods and villages kept hiding it from us, but every few minutes we caught a glimpse of it.
- Dodie Smith

Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.
- W Eugene Smith

The whole summer stretched out before us, long, hot, endless.
September flashed like a tiny red warning light in the distance, but if I squinted, I could ignore it. I decided to squint for a while.
'It's going to be wonderful,' I said.
- Natalie Standiford

They say when you really love someone, you should be willing to set them free. So that is what I am doing. I will step back and you will move on. I will let you go.... Your happiness means everything to me. I will listen for your voice in the distance. I will look at the moon. I will keep you in my pocket. I will carry your smile with me everywhere, like a warm and comforting glow.
- Tabitha Suzuma

Your happiness means everything to me. I will listen for your voice in the distance. I will look at the moon. I will keep you in my pocket. I will carry your smile with me everywhere like a warm and comforting glow.
- Tabitha Suzuma

I raised another shot. That sound you hear is the heads of moral conservatives spontaneously exploding in the distance.
- Rob Thurman

She saw signs of another village in the distanceshe smelled smoke and saw the faint glow of something like civilization. But there was nothing for her there. She had to go get Jack now, and anyway, she was safer out here with the wolves.
- Anne Ursu

This gave him another opportunity to use one of those words that hung before him, shining and alluring. Far away in the distance there were more of them, dangerously sharp. Words that were not for him, but which he used all the same on the sly, and which had an exciting flavour and gave him a tingling feeling in the head. They were a little dangerous, all of them.
- Tarjei Vesaas

The dusk here does not arrive on the shoulders of golden sunsets any more, but on the heels of long, encroaching shadows of untraceable trees in the distance, gloomy parallel patterns that cascade over the undulating landscape of unevenly dispersed corpses and other things.
- Mirza Waheed

Hey, it's ten in the morning!' says Person, yelling at two farmers dressed in robes in the distance. 'Don't you think you ought to change out of your pajamas?
- Evan Wright

I once tried standing up on my toes to see far out in the distance, but I found that I could see much farther by climbing to a high place.
- Xun Zi

[Alon Johnson] Later wrote that, coming through a battered building near a well known and dangerous doorway. I heard something unfamiliar -- the sound of excited voices somewhere in the distance. The significance of this babble seemed to escape the tired company, but to me it suggested a sudden and radical change in the situation. Important enough to risk being shot at by showing myself in the doorway. Nothing happened, so I stepped into the street,..
- Mark Zuehlke