“Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine.”
Christopher Benfey
more infosource: Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival (New York: The Penguin press, 2012), 15.
category: advice, distance, journey, labyrinth, school of life
medium: Memoir
“Will I ever get home? It is like looking down a tremendous ski jump. The bottom is not so far away in time, but in effort and all one has to give to it, such a mighty jump.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
more infosource: Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 127.
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category: commute, distance, energy, exhaustion, home, travel
medium: diary
notes: diary entry dated Saturday, October 21, 1933
“I stood as close to them as I could without being one of them, and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet.”
Michael Herr
more infosource: Dispatches (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2009), 62.
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category: brutality, distance, proximity, vantage point, war
medium: nonfiction
notes: quoted by Mary Karr in her Twitter feed
“There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.”
Dorothy Parker
more infosource: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 9.
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category: calisthenics, distance, truth, wisecrack, wit
medium: interview
notes: Originally published in Issue 13 of The Paris Review, 1956.
“Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life.”
Antonio Porchia
more infosource: Voices: Aphorisms, selected and translated by W. S. Merwin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 16.
category: advice, distance, keys to life, life, line, map, straight
medium: aphorism
“I cried for the boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandparents ailing and stuck in Florida, their tough, unchanging forms conjured only in memory: a jewel box kept in a medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that’s where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.”
Lorrie Moore
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