Space Between Quotes

Given everything we know about the universe it would seem utterly impossible for any sane person to believe that the ultimate truth about the universe and human existence is the story of Israeli, German or Russian nationalism – or indeed of nationalism in general. A story that ignores almost the whole of time, the whole of space, the Big Bang, quantum physics and the evolution of life is at most just a tiny part of the truth. Yet people somehow manage not to see beyond it.
Indeed, billions of people throughout history have believed that for their lives to have meaning, they don't even need to be absorbed into a nation or a great ideological movement. It is enough if they just 'leave something behind', thereby ensuring that their personal story continues beyond their death. The 'something' I leave behind is ideally my soul or my personal essence. If I am reborn in a new body after the death of my present body, then death is not the end. It is merely the space between two chapters, and the plot

"that began in one chapter will carry on into the next. Many people have at least a vague faith in such a theory, even if they do not base it on any specific theology. They don't need an elaborate dogma – they just need the reassuring feeling that their story continues beyond the horizon of death. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. ~ Steve Jobs

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a "scenic" area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has "outgrown ~ Aldo Leopold

Music fills the space between them. Mark wants to take the pill that keeps him awake, but not in front of his daughter. Instead, he flirts. "There's a lot of trouble with a brown-eyed handsome man. In your travels have you found this to be true?"
This is Madeleine's favorite game. His role is to ask silly questions and hers is to answer as if he is serious, neither one acknowledging the other conversation that goes on wordlessly around them, in which some other, better version of themselves say: Isn't it nice to be father and daughter? ~ Marie-Helene Bertino

For the briefest moment, they came face to face. Their eyes locked. Then he broke the stare, swiveled, sank into a sitting position, chains clanking, with his knees up.
She watched him speechlessly as he set a cooler bag between his boots, like he was settling down to a picnic or something. An image of the contents as hospital blood bags, complete with juice straws, flashed through her mind.
Unfolding her legs, she made herself as comfortable as she could on the cold outer edge of the sill. An intangible and unnameable charge electrified the space between them, and at first, neither of them said anything.
[ ... ] Finally she heard him unzip the bag and watched him pull out a small cylinder.
"I thought you might like some crappy ice cream," he said. ~ Kelly Creagh

Everything's got space between it, the planets, trees, your eyes. Your eyes get too close together, it's a whole different world. You can lose perspective. ~ Mos Def

The more perfect something is, the less it can be loved -- like a face, a body, voice, tone, color, or music itself. In playing a piece, don't strive for perfection: it will kill the piece in that it will prevent it from entering the emotions. That's the kind of advice you can't do anything with except perhaps later, when you don't even know you're doing it. It's part of the freeze of counterpoint.'
'I've never heard that expression,' she said.
'Stasis may be a better word -- the liberation of the space between two contradictions. Let me explain if I can. If two waves of equal but opposite amplitude meet in water, what do you get'
'Flat water.'
'In sound?'
'Silence.'
'Right. From agitation, peace, a perfection that you might have thought unobtainable from the clash of contradictory elements.'
'I think you've explained the magic of counterpoint very well.'
'Not really. It's inexplicable. I've noted it, that's all. Half of humanity's troubles arise from the inability to see that contradictory propositions can be valid simultaneously. ~ Mark Helprin

Corinne is one of those people for whom life is just the space between crises. ~ Jodi Picoult

Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence, through what we do, say, wear, buy, and how we enjoy ourselves and who and how we love. Yet it is an illusion that is constantly being undermined by change and death. We can use diamonds in whatever way we like. They are empty things, pretty as water, yet within them - if we want to see it - there is blood, dust, love, curses, and suffering. There is desire to make someone happy, there is admiration, there is ostentation ... and there is a company's profit curve. ~ Victoria Finlay

We danced in the handkerchief-big space between the speak-easy tables, in which stood the plates of half-eaten spaghetti or chicken bones and the bottles of Dago red. For about five minutes the dancing had some value in itself, then it became very much like acting out some complicated and portentous business in a dream which seems to have a meaning but whose meaning you can't figure out. Then the music was over, and stopping dancing was like waking up from the dream, being glad to wake up and escape and yet distressed because now you won't ever know what it had been all about. ~ Robert Penn Warren

There is a mysterious dance that happens in the family between privilege and responsibility, between trust and accountability. One step forward of responsibility allows for a step forward of privilege. The weight of trust requires the counterweight of accountability. Cloistered parents allow space between themselves and their children for this dance to take place. We don't smother our kids. Neither do we abandon them. We dance together with them. ~ David Robinson

Jake shuts the van's back doors and lies down next to me. He's really close, so close I can feel him breathing on the nape of my neck. I could put more space between us, but instead I scoot backward, leaning into him, my back pressed into the pleasant warmth of his front. Jake holds his breath for a moment, but he doesn't say anything. And he doesn't move away ... He moves so his mouth is right under my ear, brushing the skin there, and one of his hands slides up, resting on my rib cage. My whole body tingles as he starts to sing softly into my ear. ~ Hannah Harrington

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

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. ~ Leslie Feinberg

Noah was a funeral pyre. He was burning. The flames rose to staggering heights and blazed in white, hot tongues. Jeremie had once told him a story of the burial rites of the Norse. They'd burn their dead, believing the high smoke carried their loved ones' souls to Valhalla.

Noah was beyond Valhalla. Beyond the creamy spaciousness above the clouds, beyond the limits of the very earth. He floated among the stars, joined them in holy communion, knew each one by name. Then they were within him, scores of them, bright and hot, turning his ribs into a furnace as they shifted and created constellations in his soul. And all the while, the summer sang in his lungs.

There was no space between him and Jeremie. Where one ended, the other began, and still Jeremie pulled him closer like the moon pulls the tide, gripping him tightly in the same way he'd gripped Noah's heart, had gripped his entire being. ~ Lily Velez

Galaxies were mere tide pools. The empty space between them was a killing field of dark-matter predators and electromagnetic anglerfish. ~ T.R. Darling

The space between things is important to me. The projections, that darkness between the words or the images is very important. ~ Robert Barry

Live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning. ~ Jeanette Winterson

My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, presence of lack of air spaces between metal flues and woodwork, etc., and the results were presented in these terms. ~ Benjamin Whorf

There's a dream in the
space between the hammer and the nail: the dream of
about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream, but the nail will
take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever. ~ Richard Siken

Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was the second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. [ ... ] It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. [ ... ] He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. ~ David Foster Wallace

She cannot remember her mother's face ... This is the woman who brought her into the world ... This is the woman her father loved. Yet every time she turns her mind's eye in her mother's direction she sees only the men she is talking to, the children she is playing with, the maids to whom she is giving orders ... She begins to realise how alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white space between the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning. ~ Mark Haddon

I recommend the French beret, for it gives the impression of just the right soft toughness, a veritable wave of sophisticated brain matter. It is the kind of hat that inspires a person to grow into it, to become the person they never knew they could be. The space between the top of the head and the beginnings of hat is among the most intimate of areas: earlobe behinds, elbow insides, and anuses. One must pay heed to such spaces for they hold a potential not fully known (but generally agreed to be vast). ~ Meia Geddes

Somewhere in the dead space between house and shelter civilians became soldiers. ~ Sara Novic

You get used to the exact amount of space between lines. You write a word and then you write an alternate word over it. You want enough room so you can read it, so the lines can't be too close. ~ Stephen Sondheim

When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

His mind had not changed at the same pace as his life, and he felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be. He ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It's very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that's something that resonates for me. ~ Tom McCarthy

This was the first time I noticed it, the inevitable space between father and man. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

The Gunner's Dream (From The Final Cut)

Floating down through the clouds
Memories come rushing up to meet me now.
In the space between the heavens
and in the corner of some foreign field
I had a dream.
I had a dream.
Good-bye Max.
Good-bye Ma.
After the service when you're walking slowly to the car
And the silver in her hair shines in the cold November air
You hear the tolling bell
And touch the silk in your lapel
And as the tear drops rise to meet the comfort of the band
You take her frail hand
And hold on to the dream.
A place to stay
Enough to eat
Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street
Where you can speak out loud
About your doubts and fears
And what's more no-one ever disappears
You never hear their standard issue kicking in your door.
You can relax on both sides of the tracks
And maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control
And everyone has recourse to the law
And no-one kills the children anymore.
And no one kills the children anymore.

Night after night
Going round and round my brain
His dream is driving me insane.
In the corner of some foreign field
The gunner sleeps tonight.
What's done is done.
We cannot just write off his final scene.
Take heed of his dream. ~ Roger Waters

Vas dragged me over to Akos, so we knelt across from each other, barely an arm's length of space between us.
"I'm sorry" was all I could think to say to him. That he was here was my fault, after all. If I hadn't fallen in with the renegades…but it was too late for thoughts like that.
Everything inside me slowed as his eyes met mine, like I had stopped him. I looked him over carefully, like a caress, his tousled brown hair, the dusting of freckles on his nose, and his gray eyes, unguarded for the first time I could remember. I didn't see the bruises or the blood that marked him. I listened to his breaths. I had heard them in my ear just after I kissed him, every exhale bursting a little, like he didn't want to let it go.
"I always thought my fate meant I would die a traitor to my country." Akos's voice was rough, like he had worn away at it by screaming. "But you made it so I won't. ~ Veronica Roth

He walked right to her, his long strides eating the space between them and sucking the oxygen in front of her ~ Cristin Harber

I learned to create a little more space between my thoughts and actions - actually between my feelings and reactions. This is extremely important; without it, life can be a real roller coaster ride. ~ Jaggi Vasudev

He leaned toward me. Suddenly the space between us shrank.
"I will do everything in my power to ensure your survival, and should the need arise, I will put myself between danger and you." His voice was quiet and intimate. "Do not hesitate to use me as your shield."
His voice sent tiny shivers through me.
Wow. ~ Ilona Andrews

You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind - things that exist only there - and clear out space for yourself: ... by comprehending the scale of the world ... by contemplating infinite time ... by thinking of the speed with which things change - each part of every thing; the narrow space between our birth and death; the infinite time before; the equally unbounded time that follows. ~ Marcus Aurelius

There's a simple elegance in the silent space between Leah and me. ~ Dave Cenker

Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other. ~ Esther Perel

My heart is fluid and soaring. There's no longer any space between heartbeats. ~ Lauren Oliver

As the staggered lines past him, he thought about the space between what we remember and what happened, the space between what we predict and what will happen. ~ John Green

We are each of us a bird in a body. In the space between bodies lies a solitude formed by the vibration of differing thoughts. ~ Meia Geddes

In France, we leave a single space before and after most punctuation marks. In England, there are generally no spaces before punctuation, and one inserts a double space between sentences. ~ Tasha Alexander

How we traverse the space between us when conflict arises has a profound effect on the health and longevity of our relationships. ~ Sharon Salzberg

There are people who have too much space between their ears, and given the time, do nothing but free fall forever inside their head. It's a spooky thing to be left alone inside an angry innerverse. ~ James St. James

I had to teach myself that love was very much like a painting. The negative space between people was just as important as the positive space we occupy. The air between our resting bodies, and the breath in our conversations, were all like the white of the canvas, and the rest our relationship- the laughter and the memories- were the brushstroke applied over time. ~ Alyson Richman

Pay attention to the gap - the gap between two thoughts, the brief, silent space between words in a conversation, between the notes of a piano or flute, or the gap between the in-breath and the out-breath. When you pay attention to those gaps, awareness of 'something' becomes - just awareness. The formless dimension of pure conciousness arises from within you and replaces identification with form. ~ Eckhart Tolle

From the beginning I thought about working with the body in movement, the space between the body and clothes. I wanted the clothes to move when people moved. The clothes are also for people to dance or laugh. ~ Issey Miyake

Sometimes what we want to do and what we must do are not the same. Pasquo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be. ~ Jess Walter

That night, I took a while falling asleep and when I did, I had a strange dream. She was sitting in my rocking chair and rocking herself, her dead eyes fixed on me. I lay on my bed, paralysed with fear, unable to move, unable to scream, my limbs refusing to move to my command. The room was suddenly freezing cold, the heater had probably stopped working in the night because the electricity supply had been cut and the inverter too had run out. At one point, I was uncertain whether I was dreaming or awake, or in that strange space between dreaming and wakefulness, where the soul wanders out of the body and explores other dimensions. What I knew was that I was chilled to the bones, chilled in a way that made it impossible for me to move myself, to lever myself to a sitting position in order to switch the bedside lamp on and check whether this was really happening. I could hear her in my head. Her voice was faint, feathery, and sibilant, as if she was whispering through a curtain of rain. Her words were indistinct, she called my name, she said words that pierced through my ears, words that meshed into ice slivers in my brain and when I thought finally that I would freeze to death an ice cold tiny body climbed into the quilt with me, putting frigidly chilly arms around me, and whispered, 'Mother, I'm cold.' Icicles shot up my spine, and I sat up, bolt upright in my bed, feeling the covers fall from me and a small indent in the mattress where something had been, a moment ago. There ~ Kiran Manral

Tybalt put a hand on my back, resting it in the space between my shoulder blades. "Are you all right?"
"Not on this or any other planet." I straightened, up looking around. We were under the old bridge spanning the creek that cut through the middle of campus. I sighed. "See, if I'd just realized where we'd come out, I could have thrown up in the water. Less mess."
"Yes, but won't you think about the frogs? I'm sure they receive enough unwanted vomit from the student body. ~ Seanan McGuire

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

I tell him I'd better get going, because Margot's coming home from Scotland tonight, and I want to stock the fridge with all her favorite foods.
Peter's face falls. "You don't want to hang out a little longer? I can take you to the store."
"I still have to clean up the upstairs, too," I say, standing up.
He tugs on my shirt and tries to pull me back onto the bed. "Come on, five more minutes."
I lie back down next to him and he cuddles in close, but I'm still thinking about the yearbook. I've been working on his scrapbook for months; the least he can do is write me a nice yearbook message.
"This is good practice for college," he murmurs, pulling me toward him, wrapping his arms around me. "The beds are small at UVA. How big are the beds at UNC?"
My back to him, I say, "I don't know. I didn't get to see the dorms."
He tucks his head in the space between my neck and shoulder. "That was a trick question," he says, and I can feel him smile against my neck. "To check and see if you visited a random UNC guy's dorm room with Chris. Congrats, you passed the test."
I can't help but laugh. ~ Jenny Han

For most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter. ~ Iris Murdoch

I've recently started practicing japa meditation. Meditating has always been a bit difficult for me, but japa asks you to focus on the space between things, and psychologically knowing I have anchor points frees me to do so. ~ Allison McAtee

Maybe this is what happens when a person grows up. Maybe the space between you and the other people in your life grows so big you can stuff it full of all kinds of lies. ~ Ali Benjamin

I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see eye-to-eye, unblinking. Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain and consciousness as for its intertwining of life and death. I had thought that a life spent in the space between the two would grant me not merely a stage for compassionate action but an elevation of my own being: getting as far away from petty materialism, from self- important trivia, getting right there, to the heart of the matter, to truly life and death decisions and struggles... surely a kind of transcendence would be found there? ~ Paul Kalanithi

And as we stood there, a curious thing happened: a kind of window opened in the rain, just as if a cloud had been hitched aside like a curtain, and in the space between we saw a landscape that took our breath away. The high ground along which the road ran fell away through a black, woody belt, and beyond it, for more miles than you can imagine, lay the whole basin of the Black Country, clear, amazingly clear, with innumerable smokestacks rising out of it like the merchant shipping of the world laid up in an estuary at low tide, each chimney flying a great pennant of smoke that blew away eastward by the wind, and the whole scene bleared by the light of a sulphurous sunset. No one need ever tell me again that the Black Country isn't beautiful. In all Shrophire and Radnor we'd seen nothing to touch it for vastness and savagery. And then this apocalyptic light! It was like a landscape of the end of the world, and, curiously enough, though men had built the chimneys and fired the furnaces that fed the smoke, you felt that the magnificence of the scene owed nothing to them. Its beauty was singularly inhuman and its terror – for it was terrible, you know – elemental. It made me wonder why you people who were born and bred there ever write about anything else. ~ Francis Brett Young

Think of two parallel lines. [ ... ] One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny. - David Ferrie (339) ~ Don DeLillo

In a house, as in a garden, there is a point when over-mingling can occur. At first, when the new plants are dug in, there is too much space between them. They seem artificial, temporary. Then, as they grow, the bed finds a point of balance, the taller trees occupying the upper layers, the sprawling shrubs - the hydrangeas, buddleia, pittosporum - filling out the middle, and the smaller bulbs and ground covers punctuating the under-spaces. Then, without warning, equilibrium is lost. A rampant jasmine covers an adolescent tree; a hydrangea thrives, forcing out a lilly pilly that struggles for light beneath a spreading magnolia. The spaces are subsumed. In the house, there was a period when everyone thrived. Even Heloise had been noticed by Jerome, who was sitting down with her on most days and doing sums and geography, and reading poetry. 'She has real talent,' he said to Helena, over the kitchen bench. She raised an eyebrow ambiguously but didn't comment. Then, slowly, the balance began to slip. ~ Emily Bitto

There's a space between forgetting and moving on, and it's not easy to find. ~ Jennifer E. Smith

I need space between me and the audience - and the more space the better. ~ Ray Lamontagne

Something bloomed right then and there in the small dark space between us. I didn't know what it was, but I knew enough to know it was rare and delicate. And it felt so real I might have been able to reach out and touch it if I tried. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

As a younger person, my philosophy was jump off a cliff. I realize now that there are stairs and elevators. I am learning every day to allow the space between where I am and where I want to be to inspire me and not terrify me. I can even ask for help! Not feeling that I have to know everything, and that's where the growth comes in, in the not knowing. ~ Tracee Ellis Ross

You say I have a light about me, but you are my light."
Zayne reclaimed the space between us, kissing me. "You're never getting rid of me now."
"I wouldn't want to. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

I looked at Hayle.

"I'm yours, you're right. I started with you, you end with me," the voice said.

"I wonder who you are, then," Hayle said. "Because I'm not positive you're Sylvester."

"I'm not. I'm every monster I've ever fought. Every enemy I've defeated. I'm Sylvester and I'm not. I'm the Noble that Sylvester will become."

A frown creased the space between his eyes. "The Noble you describe sounds like a monstrous one."

"Isn't it?" the voice asked. "What a mistake you've made."

We stuck a knife between his ribs, and swiftly backed away, bringing the knife with us, so the wound could bleed freely, air escaping his lungs. ~ Wildbow

We are product of neither nature nor nurture; we are a product of choice, because there is always a space between stimulus and response. As we wisely exercise our power to choose based on principles, the space will become larger. ~ Stephen Covey

We are adrift on a sea of moonlight sand, the silence as infinite as the space between the stars. ~ Jessica Khoury

It's the stuff between stars, the space between roots, the thing that makes electricity get up in the morning.

It fucking hates us ~ Maggie Stiefvater

After you free yourself from the incredible expectations of love through the media from the time you were so high, you realise that it's the spaces between the notes that make music. ~ Hector Elizondo

The breath is the first tool for opening the space between the story you tell yourself about love. ~ Sharon Salzberg

I don't know when I started to realize that my country's past was incomprehensible and obscure to me, a real shadowy terrain, nor can I remember the precise moment when all that i'd believed so trustworthy and predictable - the place I'd grown up, whose language I speak and customs I know, the place whose past I was taught in school and in university, whose present I have become accustomed to interpreting and pretending I understand - began to turn into a place of shadows out of whcih jumped horrible creatures as soon as we dropped our guard. With time I have come to think that this is the true reason why writers write aboutn the places of childhood and adolescence and even their early touth: you don't write about what you know and understand, and much less do you write because you know and understand, but because you understand that all your knowledge and comprehension is false, a mirage and an illusion, so your books are not, could not be, more than elaborate displays of disorientation: extensive and multifarious declarations of preplexity. All that I thought was so clear, you then think, now turns out to be full of duplicities and hidden intentions, like a friend who betrays us. To that revelation, which is always annoying and often frankly painful, the writer responds in the only way one knows how: with a book. And that's how you try to mitigate your disconcertion, reduce the space between what you don't know and what can be known, and most of all resolve your profound di ~ Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Mikhail, I don't know what you want." She didn't know what she wanted either.
He stood up then, power and grace combined. His shadow reached her before he did. His strength was enormous, but his touch was gentle as he pulled her to her feet. His hands slid up her arms, rested lightly on her shoulders, thumbs stroking the pulse in her neck. His touch sent warmth curling in her abdomen.
She was so small beside him, so fragile and vulnerable. "Do not try to leave me, little one. We need one another." His dark head bent lower, his mouth brushing her eyelids, sending little darts of fire licking along her skin. "You make me remember what living is," he whispered in his mesmerizing voice. His mouth found the corner of hers, and a jolt of electricity sizzled through her body.
Raven reached up to touch the shadowed line of his jaw, to place a hand on the heavy muscles of his chest in an attempt to put space between them. "Listen to me, Mikhail." Her voice was husky. "We both know what loneliness is, what real isolation can do to a person. It's beyond my imagination that I can be this close to you, physically touch you, and not be swamped with unwanted burdens. But we can't do this."
Amusement crept into the dark fire of his eyes, a hint of tenderness. His fingers curled around the nape of her neck. "Oh, I think we can." His black velvet voice was pure seduction, his smile frankly sensual. ~ Christine Feehan

Maybe he sees it on my face, that fraction of a second when
I let my guard down, because in that moment his expression softens and his eyes
go bright as flame and even though I barely see him move, suddenly he has
closed the space between us and he's wrapping his warm hands over my
shoulders - fingers so warm and strong I almost cry out - and saying, "Lena. I
like you, okay? That's it. That's all. I like you." His voice is so low and hypnotic
it reminds me of a song. I think of predators dropping silently from trees: I think
of enormous cats with glowing amber eyes, just like his. ~ Lauren Oliver

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

The lesson here is temperament. Wanting something is fine but there's no need to
be reckless. If you've lost the upper hand in a relationship you've got no one to blame but yourself. Taking a relaxed or even an aloof approach sometimes is the wise path. Be cautious though because being indifferent or callous to someone you care about is just stupid.
The principle of least interest is like building a fire. You can't just stack piles and piles of wood on and light a match, you'll smother it. The fire needs fuel, it needs room to breathe. Put a little space between you and what you want, be willing to let it breathe, and before you know it you'll be enjoying the warmth and light from the flames. ~ Aaron Blaylock

I said that it would be easy to fall in love with you," he repeated.
"But would it be wise?"
He cocked his head to one side and their eyes locked in the short space between them. Slowly his chin went up and down in a nod. "I believe it might be the wisest thing I could do in this lifetime."
"Then you have my permission. ~ Carolyn Brown

Beau's gaze made my cheeks flush. A pleased grin touched his lips and I suddenly wanted to know how those lips would feel pressed against mine. I couldn't take my eyes off them. Even when his smile vanished I continued staring at his mouth.
"You're gonna have to stop doing that Ash," Beau whispered huskily and closed the space between us. His body was suddenly pressed against mine. I managed to shake my fascination with his lips and gaze up into his eyes. He was staring down at me with a hungry gleam I wasn't accustomed to seeing. But I liked it. I liked it a lot.
"Ash, I'm trying real hard to be good. Good isn't my thing but Sawyers important to me. Please remember I've got limits and you studying my mouth like you want a taste is pushing me dangerously close to the edge of those limits. ~ Abbi Glines

It is the silence between the notes that makes the music; it is the space between the bars that cages the tiger. ~ Zen Saying

The tunnel is lit at long intervals, so in the dark space between each dim lamp, I fear that I am lost until a shoulder bumps mine. In the circles of light I am safe again. ~ Veronica Roth

Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y'all one and it beats like your heart. ~ Jesmyn Ward

The most true-love words are not the ones that grasp and hold and bind you, twisting you both up together in some black dance. No, they are ones that leave you free to stand alone on your own solid ground, leave him to do the same, a tender space between you. ~ Deb Caletti

So is this being in love? I stay with the moment, waiting to find out, the space between us fluctuating with uncertainty. The only thing I am sure of is that each time his lips leave mine they are right back again. ~ Kea Alwang

Fire What makes a fire burn is space between the logs, a breathing space. Too much of a good thing, too many logs packed in too tight can douse the flames almost as surely as a pail of water would. So building fires requires attention to the spaces in between, as much as the wood. When we are able to build open spaces in the same way we have learned to pile on the logs, then we can come to see how it is fuel, and absence of the fuel together, that make fire possible. We only need lay a log lightly from time to time. A fire grows simply because the space is there, with openings in which the flame that knows just how it wants to burn can find its way. 12 Judy Brown ~ Peter Scazzero

...and one might suspect too that A. Cretan said : "To long to read!"

"My library is an archive of longings."
― Susan Sontag"

"There is a space between man's [sic] imagination and man's [sic] attainment that may only be traversed by his longing."
― Khalil Gibran [sick] ~ A. Cretan

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past. ~ Don DeLillo

Books are my refuge. I can crawl into the space between the pages and curl my back to loneliness. ~ Anubhav Mishra

And now I lost my last treasure: the dreaming. For nothing in the dreams took the place of the human warmth I had witnessed. Now I felt utterly poor, because I could not create a human companion.

This hunger which had inhabited her entire being, which had thinned her blood, transpired through her bones, attacked the roots of her hair, given a fragility to her skin which was never to disappear entirely, had been so enormous that it had marked her whole being and her eyes with an indelible mark. Although her life changed and every want was filled later, this appearance of hunger remained. As if nothing could ever quite fill it. Her being had received no sun, no food, no air, no warmth, no love. It retained open pores of yearning and longing, mysterious spongy cells of absorption. The space between actuality, absolute deprivation, and the sumptuosity of her imagination could never be entirely covered. What she had created in the void, in the emptiness, in the bareness continued to shame all that was offered her, and her large, infinitely blue eyes continued to assert the immensity of her hunger. ~ Anais Nin

We see parts of each other, and we put them together. But if I want to see you in totality, you need to move away; we need space between us. Across the street, I can see all of you at once, but then I also see this huge vista of space surrounding you, coming in and compressing you. ~ Diego Giacometti

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

No one has to know until we adopt in a few years. I'm sure there are loads of damn babies waiting for parents to buy them. We will be fine."

I know she hasn't accepted my offer of marriage, or even being in a relationship with me, but I hope she doesn't use this opportunity to remind me of that.

She laughs softly. "Damn babies? Please tell me you don't think there is a store somewhere downtown where you walk in and purchase a baby?" She lifts her hand to her mouth to stop herself from laughing at me.

"There isn't?" I joke. "What's Babies 'R' Us, then?"

"Oh my goodness!" She tilts her head back in laughter.

I reach across the small space between us and grab hold of her hand. "If that damn store isn't full of babies, lined up, ready for purchase, than I'm suing for false advertisement. ~ Anna Todd

Och, Christ, woman," he hissed. Devouring the space between them in two strides, he cupped her jaw with one big hand, tipped her face up, and claimed her mouth in a kiss. Once, twice, three times. Then he drew back and glared down at her. "I thought you were dead. I couldn't fucking get out of there and I thought of a thousand things I'd done wrong and imagined a million deaths for you. Kiss me, Jessica. Show me you're alive. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Where are you staying?
Our house. He shifted closer and I stopped breathing.
Not good. I really needed to breathe and leaned back further in my chair to put space between me and his stubble darkened chin, his oh-so-kissable mouth, his windblown hair, his...his...everything.
For the zillionth time, I wondered what the statute of limitations was on stupid decisions. Marrying him had to top the list. ~ Sue Barr

There are different types of salvation." he said, diplomatically. "No." Rena shook him off. "There's only one. In the voice of God, speaking through the space between the stars. ~ Anne Corlett

I don't think love is a tricky issue at all. Love is best understood when we share: Share time, energy, food, resources, insights, information, whatever. It's usually thought of as something that exists between two people, but that's just because it's easier to see and feel in the space between them. Each person is sharing a lot with the other. ~ Jason Mraz

I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, lonelier and colder than the space between the stars. It was more frightening than being dead. ~ Peter Carey

My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way. ~ Anne Lamott

I was afraid of what he might be able to see. Because all of a suddent it didn't feel like we were standing on the beach anymore. It felt like we were balanced on a thin, thin line. That fragile one that divides the invisible space between something and nothing, or before and after. ~ Jessi Kirby

Elizabeth Taylor is, in my opinion, the greatest actress in film history. She instinctively understands the camera and its nonverbal intimacies. Opening her violet eyes, she takes us into the liquid realm of emotion, which she inhabits by Pisces intuition. Richard Burton said that Taylor showed him how to act for the camera. Economy and understatement are essential. At her best, Elizabeth Taylor simply is. An electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens. It is an extra-sensory, pagan phenomenon. ~ Camille Paglia

In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Pierce took a step back to put more space between us. "I demanded too much," he said, his sadness at himself, not me. "I see in your heart you found someone who makes you strong who does not hold too tight, who has learned that the pain of losing you to fate is more than the pain of you dying in a cage. Who is he? ~ Kim Harrison

Then what do you want?" she asked, meeting his intense gaze.
"You, Haven. Always you. I'm fucking starving for you. All the time. You think you're not wanted? I want you. I want you so much I don't know what I'm doing half the time. Every minute of every day, all I can think about is you." Breathing hard, eyes flashing, Dare loomed over her, the words hanging in the tight space between them.
And they were the most amazing, life-giving words anyone had ever said to her. Which made her know exactly what to say. "Then have me. ~ Laura Kaye