The Distance From Me To You Quotes

Why should she have to feel unsafe? Didn't this world belong to her as much as it belonged to any man? Yes it did. McKenna refused to let them make her feel unsafe, either by cornering her, or by making her feel like she needed one to protect her ~ Marina Gessner

I nudged my head into his shoulder. "Thanks for offering to come over."
"you realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you," he said.
"i guess?" i said.
"all efforts to save me from you will fail," he said. ~ John Green

There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight. What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The body was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind. ~ Teju Cole

Now standing in one corner of a boxing ring with a .22 caliber Colt automatic pistol, shooting a bullet weighing only 40 grains and with a striking energy of 51 foot pounds at 25 feet from the muzzle, I will guarantee to kill either Gene Tunney or Joe Louis before they get to me from the opposite corner. This is the smallest caliber pistol cartridge made; but it is also one of the most accurate and easy to hit with, since the pistol has no recoil. I have killed many horses with it, cripples and bear baits, with a single shot, and what will kill a horse will kill a man. I have hit six dueling silhouettes in the head with it at regulation distance in five seconds. It was this type of pistol that Millen boys' colleague, Abe Faber, did all his killings with. Yet this same pistol bullet fired at point blank range will not dent a grizzly's skull, and to shoot a grizzly with a .22 caliber pistol would simply be one way of committing suicide ~ Ernest Hemingway,

My conduct with my friends is motivated: each being is, I believe, incapable on his own, of going to the end of being. If he tries, he is submerged within a "private being" which has meaning only for himself. Now there is no meaning for a lone individual: bing alone would of itself reject the "private being" if it saw it as such (if I wish my life to have meaning for me, it is necessary that it have meaning for others: no one would dare give to life a meaning which he alone would perceive, from which life in its entirety would escape, except within himself). At the extreme limit of the "possible", it is true, there is nonsense . . . but only of that which had a prior sense: this is fulguration, even "apotheosis" of nonsense. But I don't attain the extreme limit on my own and, in actual fact, I can't believe the extreme limit attained, for I never remain there. If I had to be the only one having attained it (assuming that I had . . .), it would be as thought it had not occurred. For if there subsisted a satisfaction, as small as I can imagine it to be, it would distance me as much from the extreme limit. I cannot for a moment cease to incite myself to attain the extreme limit, and cannot make a distinction between myself and those with whom I desire to communicate.
~George Bataille, "Inner Experience" pg. 42 ~ Georges Bataille

To me, the Pacific, or at least the part of this Pacific, was my mooring. As far as a I drove, once I saw the ocean rise up in the distance as my car dipped down over the hill, I knew I was minutes from home. ~ Lea Geller

March 28, 2012
The dreams won't subside. I don't just have them at night anymore but during the day as well. Erotic flashes of her lips, her breasts, her thighs.
My imagination does not rest. I yearn to know what she feels like, what she tastes like. My dreams make me long for more.
This woman is a virus. Every cell in my body has been infected by her. I try to remain civil, normal when I'm in her presence but she'll lick her lips or play with the top of her collar and suddenly memories of my dreams will come flooding back.
This woman is a virus that has dominated every part of my being. She attacks my lungs, squeezing the breath out of me until I'm hopelessly gasping for air.
This isn't a want. This isn't a need. This is an ache. I ache with wanting. I ache with need. I ache until the pain finally leaves me feeling numb. I long for that numbness. It's the only time I feel like…I don't feel.
I try to run away, to keep my distance but this woman is a virus. She's in my blood. Her smile stops my feet from moving. The only time she allows me to breathe freely is when I inhale her perfume. I feel myself losing control.
These dreams, this ache is slowly driving me insane.
This woman is a virus and she's eating me alive. ~ Jacqueline Francis - The Journal

It ruffles me a bit, not being able to tell apart my best friend from my girlfriend from this distance. But then one of the figures dashes across the sandy trail and jumps into my arms and I'm reasonably sure it's Liv and not Perry. ~ Veronica Rossi

I snapped my teeth at him making him retract his fingers to a safe distance away from my choppers. I grinned as I turned around and made a move to grab my duvet so I could shake it out and make my bed, only to find I couldn't because Storm was lying on top of it.

I didn't even hear him come in.

"Hello, my baby boy," I cooed.

Alec gasped from behind me. "How does he fucking do that?"

I smiled as I leaned over and scratched behind Storm's ears. "Because he is a cool dog."

"This is not funny, he doesn't make a fucking sound... it's not right, not right at all!"

I grinned. "I told you," I said as I turned around to face Alec again. "He is a ninja dog. ~ L.A. Casey

What does it help me now to think back on the reeling despair that seized me and declare it a mistake! Should I have set out in high spirits with a spring in my step? I did not. Should I have had more faith in the earth's friendly forces and felt certain and invulnerable at the wounding sight of flame-hued horizons? I could not do it, I was terribly vulnerable. Should I have justified myself, raising my eyes to the mountains? Oh, I tried, and always in vain...
And so one day I wanted to break away, not knowing exactly from which fate, seeming to grasp only that I had been struck by calamity, as anyone can be, and now must stand apart, silent. How do the others live, I asked myself, how do they bear this land and the day to come, how do they bear it? But should the dusk of rapture fall once more, this shadowless day ebb, the deer stand on the sloping winter meadow already cloaked in fog; should I be granted one more such innocent hour, I will lower my eyes and repent, and never again lead myself into temptation, but admit: we are at home in but a narrow precinct, can cover but a tiny distance - and beyond, at an immeasurable distance, the ships land on the death's shores. ~ Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Contrary to what I had thought, I did not need easing circumstances, relief from difficulty, and distance from pain in order to be free. I was learning that the freedom Jesus secured for me is not freedom from pain and suffering here and now. Rather, it's freedom from bitterness, anger, fear, resentment, self-pity, offense, and hopelessness in the crucible of present pain and suffering; it is freedom from my burdensome sense of "I deserve better," the encumbrance of entitlement. I was realizing that only the gospel can free us from the enslaving pressure to defend ourselves. That's real freedom - God-sized freedom! ~ Tullian Tchividjian

The opportunity to orbit the Earth, witnessing multiple sunrises and sunsets every day, looking back to our small blue life-sustaining jewel from a distance, gives me the greatest sense of anticipation. ~ Sarah Brightman

Malachi sighed as he gazed at me. Even from that distance, the heat of his expression blew several circuits in my mind. "Because of the way she looked at me. She should have looked at me with fear. I did some pretty scary things. Most people would agree I am a scary person."

I stared at him, amazed as he echoed my own words so flawlessly.

"But that's not how she looked at me. She looked at me as if she saw something else inside me - something wonderful, something worth knowing - and she was the only person who could make it come out. She taught me things. She gave me things. Amazing things. A vision of myself - different from what I had been, better, but still me. I don't think she really recognized how she was bringing me to life. It came so naturally to her."

"I don't know if I did the same for her," he said quietly. "Since we're here right now, my guess would be that I didn't. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't change how I feel. I love her, and I would do anything for her. ~ Sarah Fine

Wondering how I would make it through a hand-to-hand duel, I glanced around--and just then I saw one of Galdran's equerries fall from his saddle, his banner-spear spinning through the air toward me. Instinctively my free hand reached up and I caught the spear by the shaft. Ignoring the sting in my hand, I jammed my sword into its sheath and started whirling the spear round and round, making the banner snap and stream as my prancing, sidling horse circled round my brother. Horses turned their heads and backed away; no one was able to edge up and get in a good blow at Bran, who swayed in his saddle, his bad arm hanging limp. The warriors fell back, and no one swung at me.
Dimly I became aware of an ugly, harsh voice shouting over the crash and thuds of battle. Keeping the banner whirling, I guided my horse with my knees and risked a glance back over my shoulder--and looked straight into Galdran's rage-darkened face. He said something, spittle flying from his mouth, as he pointed straight at me.
A moment later a flicker of movement on my immediate left caused me to glance round. Shevraeth was there, next to me. "Fall back," he ordered, his voice sharp.
"No. Got to protect Bran--"
There was no time for more. The Marquis was beset by furious attackers as the King shouted orders from a short distance away. Then more riders appeared from somewhere, and for a moment everything was too chaotic to follow. I found myself suddenly on the edge of the battle; there were ~ Sherwood Smith

As he spoke, he whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face ... As I watched him I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forwards through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent. For twenty minutes or more he continued his researches, measuring with the most exact care the distance between marks which were entirely invisible to me, and occasionally applying his tape to the walls in an equally incomprehensible manner. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The floor had become a sea and the bed a ship, seen from a great distance. I could hear their voices calling me from far away. It lasted a minute or less. Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe I did not. It was an image that came to haunt me, and I have often wondered what would have happened if I had done as I was told and left the silver shoes alone. Would everything then have been alright? ~ Sally Gardner

A long time from now someone unknown to me will stand on the white plain where I now stand. He will speak a different language and the mountains in the distance may have been ground down but there are certain constants that will reliably inform his life -- kings like great trees whose roots are watered in ignorance, men who come to war reluctantly only to discover they have the souls of jackals, and fortresses like mountains, as immovable and inevitable. I anticipate that a flash of intuition will make him look at the tumulus or crater or clamorous sprawling city where Troy once stood and intuit how many men once bent their minds toward its destruction. ~ Zachary Mason

Some years later, after Scott's death, we came my father and I to the Field Museum, a long dismal peristyle dwindling away into the howling distance, and inside stood before a tableau of Stone Age Man, father mother and child crouched around an artificial ember in postures of minatory quiet - until, feeling my father's eye on me, I turned and saw what he required of me - very special father and son we were that summer, he staking his everything this time on a perfect comradeship - and I, seeing in his eyes the terrible request, requiring from me his very life; I, through a child's cool perversity or some atavistic recoil from an intimacy too intimate, turned him down, turned away, refused him what I knew I could not give. ~ Walker Percy

The rapid progress of the sciences makes me sorry, at times, that I was born so soon. Imagine the power that man will have over matter, a few hundred years from now. We may learn how to remove gravity from large masses, and float them over great distances. Agriculture will double its produce with less labor. All diseases will surely be cured ... even old age. If only the moral sciences could be improved as well. Perhaps men would cease to be wolves to one another ... and human beings could learn to be human. ~ Benjamin Franklin

But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where "poem" is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality's unavailability. ~ Ben Lerner

Sometimes we ate raw onions like apples, too, I wanted to tell her. Sometimes, the tin foil held shredded chicken petrified in aspic. A fish head to suck on! I was filled with shame and hateful glee: everything I was feeling turned out at the person next to me.

I was the one with an uncut cow's tongue uncoiling in the refrigerator of his undergraduate quad, my roommates' Gatorades and half-finished pad Thai keeping a nervous distance. I sliced it thinly, and down it went with horseradish and cold vodka like the worry of a long day sloughing off, those little dots of fat between the cold meet like garlic roasted to paste.

I am the one who fried liver. Who brought his own lunch in an old Tupperware to his cubicle in the Conde Nast Building; who accidentally warmed it too long, and now the scent of buckwheat, stewed chicken, and carrots hung like radiation over the floor, few of those inhabitants brought lunch from home, fewer of whom were careless enough to heat it for too long if they did, and none of whom brought a scent bomb in the first place. Fifteen floors below, the storks who staffed the fashion magazines grazed on greens in the Frank Gehry cafeteria.

I was the one who ate mashed potatoes and frankfurters for breakfast. Who ate a sandwich for breakfast. Strange? But Americans ate cereal for dinner. Americans ate cereal, period, that oddment. They had a whole thing called 'breakfast for dinner.' And the only reason they were right and I ~ Boris Fishman

I won't be pushed away," Bracken warned. "I won't be kept at a distance. I won't tolerate walls or barriers – not just because I won't allow there to be anything standing between us, but because you don't need to protect yourself from me. You hear me, Madisyn? I'll move at your pace, but you have to let me in. You have to get used to not being alone anymore. ~ Suzanne Wright

I keep my distance from politics. Lots of money has been offered to me for campaigning over the years, and I have always refused. I used to be very politically aware and very opinionated, but I don't want to involve myself. ~ Bipasha Basu

My steamboat voyage to Albany and back, has turned out rather more favorable than I had calculated. The distance from New York to Albany is one hundred and fifty miles; I ran it up in thirty-two hours, and down in thirty. I had a light breeze against me the whole way, both going and coming, and the voyage has been performed wholly by, the power of the steam engine. I overtook many sloops and schooners beating to windward and parted with them as if they had been at anchor. The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved. ~ Robert Fulton

You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you. All efforts to save me from you will fail. ~ John Green

Whatever the cause, I could not meet his sunshine with cloud. If this were my last moment with him, I would not waste it in forced, unnatural distance. I loved him well - too well not to smite out of my path even Jealousy herself, when she would have obstructed a kind farewell. A cordial word from his lips, or a gentle look from his eyes, would do me good, for all the span of life that remained to me; it would be comfort in the last strait of loneliness; I would take it - I would taste the elixir, and pride should not spill the cup. ~ Charlotte Bronte

This is not what you want to hear, but to me, it doesn't seem there was a time before I loved you. And though I try to keep my distance from you ... even now you keep giving me reasons to love you more. ~ Cayla Kluver

After a minute I leaned back, elbows on the table, and looked up for the twinkle of the first star in the evening sky. When we were little, it was a ritual Finn and I did on the front porch. He'd make his wish silently, and I would too, but I never could keep a secret; and I'd tell him what I wished every time. He'd always tell me it wouldn't come true, but I didn't believe him. I'd had plenty of them come true, from a new box of crayons showing up out of nowhere to a bag of candy left on my bed. It had been a while, though, and the only thing I'd wish for now was impossible. I found the first star in a patch of burnt-orange sky, above the crinkly purple mountains in the distance, and then I wished my brother back anyway. ~ Jessi Kirby

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

Still seasick?" Milo asked. "What does it look like?" Milo laughed. "I'll take that as a yes. I can't believe you've never been to sea before." "Believe it. Now go away and leave me to die." "Don't worry, it won't be much longer now. I can see land from here." Felix managed to raise his bloodshot eyes to see that, far in the distance, across miles upon miles of churning, open sea - His stomach flopped and gurgled. - was the edge of land. "Praise the goddess," Felix groaned. "I think I might stay in Kraeshia forever." "I ~ Morgan Rhodes

His face was so close to mine that I could feel his breath against my skin. His scent was familiar, and it was that familiarity that decided me. Instead of pulling away from him or continuing with the improv and 'fainting' in his arms to pretend I was dead, I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him into me, closing the short distance between our lips.
I kissed him with everything in me. I put all my pain and sorrow and passion and love for him into that kiss, and his mouth opened under mine, meeting me passion for passion, pain for pain, and love for love.
And then the stupid bell rang. ~ P.C. Cast

I am first affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac'd in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell'd all human commerce, and left utterly abandon'd and disconsolate. Fain wou'd I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth; but cannot prevail with myself to mix with such deformity. I call upon others to join me, in order to make a company apart; but no one will hearken to me. Every one keeps at a distance, and dreads that storm, which beats upon me from every side. I have expos'd myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians; and can I wonder at the insults I must suffer? I have declar'd my disapprobation of their systems; and can I be surpriz'd, if they shou'd express a hatred of mine and of my person? When I look abroad, I foresee on every side, dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny and detraction. When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance. All the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; tho' such is my weakness, that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others. Every step I take is with hesitation, and every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasoning.
For with what confidence can I venture upon such bold enterprises, when beside those numberless infirmities peculiar to myself, I find so many which ~ David Hume

Somewhere in the distance I hear the bucket clatter to the floor. I plunge the knife into his head, again and again. His arms lash out blindly, getting in the way. Blood mixes with water cascading to the floor. Meathead staggers to his feet, pulling off his shirt, trying to peel away the agony, but his skin comes away with it, leaving a raw, red mess.

There's a shrill alarm and the sound of pounding feet. I hurl the knife through the bars at the window. A blur of dark faces converge in my vision, fists and feet, punching and kicking. Meathead's mates are yanking me off, trying to hurt me. Screws come rushing and soon they're everywhere as I'm half-carried, half-dragged along the corridor.

'Blimey,' a thought comes from somewhere in all the chaos, 'I've only been out a day and already I'm heading straight back down the chokey!' The last thing I see, as a screaming Meathead is hurried to the hospital, is my cellmate in the middle of the crowd peering worriedly after me. Course he's worried! The stinky bastard is wondering where his next bit of scag is coming from! ~ Harry Shaw

It resembled the Catatumbo Lightning. At some distance from the coast, at a not-to-distant point, some angry god seemed to be unleashing an electric fury on the defenseless sea. Amanda watched with concern the uninterrupted succession of sparks, the sky regurgitating after swallowing the sun. And in the breeze, increasingly intense, she heard the echo of a menacing roar. ~ Me