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Remoteness   /rimˈoʊtnəs/   Listen
Remoteness

noun
1.
The property of being remote.  Synonyms: farawayness, farness.
2.
A disposition to be distant and unsympathetic in manner.  Synonyms: aloofness, standoffishness, withdrawnness.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Remoteness" Quotes from Famous Books



... wandering as his custom was, one hot and thunderous day, in the country lanes; it was very still, and through the soft haze that filled the air, the distant trees and fields lost their remoteness, and stood stiffly and quaintly as though painted. There seemed a presage of storm in the church-tower, which showed a ghostly white among the elms. A fitful breeze stirred at intervals. Hugh drew near the hamlet, and all of a sudden stepped into a stream of inconceivable sweetness ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... such as Southwest Africa and certain of the South Pacific islands, which, owing to the sparseness of their population or their small size or their remoteness from the centers of civilization or their geographical contiguity to the territory of the mandatory and other circumstances, can be best administered under the laws of the mandatory as integral portions of its territory subject to the ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan

... N. distance; space &c 180; remoteness, farness^, far- cry to; longinquity^, elongation; offing, background; remote region; removedness^; parallax; reach, span, stride. outpost, outskirt; horizon; aphelion; foreign parts, ultima Thule [Lat.], ne plus ultra [Lat.], antipodes; long range, giant's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... comparatively late period of past time, our imaginary spectator would meet with a state of things very similar to that which now obtains; but that the likeness of the past to the present would gradually become less and less, in proportion to the remoteness of his period of observation from the present day; that the existing distribution of mountains and plains, of rivers and seas, would show itself to be the product of a slow process of natural change operating upon more and more widely different antecedent conditions ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner

... will be better now to sum up the account by saying, the missionary is at work among them with some degree of success; and though, from the remoteness of many of the tribes, their strong attachment to the superstitions of their forefathers, and other causes already alluded to, the progress of Christianity is necessarily slow, there is no doubt that it will ultimately prevail; the promise has gone ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge

... distances, but under similar circumstances, representative species may occur. In very remote regions, however, whether the circumstances be similar or dissimilar, the general aspect of the organic world differs greatly, remoteness in space being thus in some measure an indication of the degree of affinity between different faunae. In deposits of different geological periods immediately following each other, we sometimes find remains of animals ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... as though she speculated on the remoteness of the journey I had come if it were measured by my ignorance, replied, "The urn, stranger, the urn does that—what else? How it may be in that out-fashioned region you have come from I cannot tell, but here—'tis so commonplace ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold

... the day. It was like no other, now that it had come. The fog, the crowd, the greasy smells of the pier, all familiar enough yesterday, took on a certain remoteness and mystery. It seemed to her that she was doing something which nobody had ever done before. She was going to discover ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis

... in with Swedenborg's contention that physical remoteness has for its higher correspondence a difference of love and of interest; and physical juxtaposition, a similarity of these. In heaven, he says, "Angels of similar character are as it were spontaneously drawn together." So would it ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... often fail of their usual influence, though they meet with no impediment to their operation. But philosophers, observing that, almost in every part of nature, there is contained a vast variety of springs and principles, which are hid, by reason of their minuteness or remoteness, find that it is at least possible the contrariety of events may not proceed from any contingency in the cause, but from the secret operation of contrary causes. This possibility is converted into certainty by further observation, when they remark that, upon an ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

... inner eye, all outer regard being quite gratuitous, seemed to have been taken by insidious stratagem, and for the first time he had an interest outside the house. He walked from one window to another, and became aware that the most irksome of solitudes is not the solitude of remoteness, but that which is just ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... unreasonable time and adapt their covering to their own will and convenience, and to that of none other; thus what is commonly conceived of as direct creation by God is moved back to a time and space inconceivable in their remoteness, while the aim and design so obvious in nature are shown to be still at work around us, growing ever busier and busier, and advancing from day to day both ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... in the deepest wood-seclusion that lay anywhere around us. Though fond of society, I was so constituted as to need these occasional retirements, even in a life like that of Blithedale, which was itself characterized by a remoteness from the world. Unless renewed by a yet further withdrawal towards the inner circle of self-communion, I lost the better part of my individuality. My thoughts became of little worth, and my sensibilities grew as arid as a tuft of moss (a thing whose life is in the shade, the rain, ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... two controversies the charge brought against its studies was their remoteness from the occupations and duties of life, to which they are the formal introduction, or, in other words, their inutility; in the latter, it was their connexion with a particular form of belief, or, in other words, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... when she herself descends From her blue throne, and o'er her vassal bends 190 That shape thrice-deified by love, those eyes Wherein the Lethe of all others lies? When my white queen of heaven's remoteness tires, Herself against her other self conspires, Takes woman's nature, walks in mortal ways, And finds in my remorse her beauty's praise? Yet all would I renounce to dream again The dream in dreams fulfilled that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... property was five hundred pounds! Why, then, was its possessor so eager to be quit of it? I walked round the house, went through its rooms, took the view from various windows, already treating it as mine, and it was long before I came upon the cause. That cause was not its remoteness or its solitude; it was lack of water. There was no well, and to have sunk a well would have been costly. The only water-supply was the rain-water from the roofs. Men can laugh at a good many deprivations, but deprivation of water is a serious business. I found upon inquiry that ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... nation of European origin, and of none perhaps more, in spite of their geographical remoteness, than of the United States, were being profoundly influenced by the astonishing events that were shaping themselves in Western Europe. At first all America was enthusiastic for the French Revolution. Americans were naturally grateful for the aid given them by the French in their own struggle for ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... incuriosity. Charron invented etrangete unsuccessfully, but which, says a French critic, would be the true substantive of the word etrange; our Locke is the solitary instance produced for "foreignness" for "remoteness or want of relation to something." Malherbe borrowed from the Latin, insidieux, securite, which have been received; but a bolder word, devouloir, by which he proposed to express cesser de vouloir, has not. A term, however, expressive and precise. Corneille happily introduced invaincu ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... is still out of the law, and the greater his intellect, the more destructive his energy. Time has made the greatest of the sheer intellects of the past appear apish and inane; and has brought closer and closer to us with each racial crisis (sometimes the clearer according to their centuries of remoteness) those spiritual intelligences who were first to bring us the conception of the Oneness of All Life, and the immortal fire, Compassion, which is to be the art of ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... things were induced by the several attractions of the situation, the remoteness from warlike and political disturbances, and the relationship of so many young girl lives, as well as the interest which attached to the school and community, making a constant demand in the shape of small articles of use or luxury, decorated by the ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler

... olden time. His pallor, in a land of rosy redness and milky whiteness; his smooth, fair hair, which in the light from the stained-glass window above the pulpit looked reddish gold; the Southern heat of passionate conviction that coloured his slow Northern speech; the remoteness of his personality; the weariness of his deep-set eyes, that bespoke such fastings and vigils as he probably never practised,—all this led to our choice ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... this, that here Mr. Peregrine Palmer was in a place whose remoteness lightened the pressure of conventional restraints, while its wildness tended to rouse all the old savage in him—its very look suggesting to the city-man its fitness for an unlawful deed for a lawful ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... skirted the roadside. Some people moved about them, leaving one the impression of a remoteness that was melancholy. The women in their bare feet made little curtesies to the Friar. Children in long dresses ran into the cabins at sight of the strangers, like rabbits scuttling back to their burrows. Having found refuge they looked out ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly

... surroundings. He lived on West Cedar Street, a few doors from Arthur Foote, well down on the slopes of Beacon Hill, a short distance from the Common and not very far from Charles Street. The aristocratic desirability of this particular location in Boston is measured by its remoteness from street cars and all means of public transit. This, however, is a mere detail. In 1896 Mr. MacDowell was appointed professor of music at Columbia University, after negotiations extending ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews

... minute doses. He mourned the extreme improbability of Blanchard's success, grounding his doubt on Will's uneven character; he pictured Blanchard's fight with the world and showed how probable it was that he would make it a losing battle by his own peculiarities of temper. He declared the remoteness of happiness for Miss Lyddon in that direction to be extreme; he deplored the unstable nature of a young man's affection all the world over; and he made solid capital out of the fact that not once since his departure had her lover communicated with Phoebe. She ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... her hests—in the spirit of a servant who abideth not in the house for ever. He was now six and twenty years of age, and had never dreamed of marriage, or even been troubled with a thought of its unattainable remoteness. He did not philosophize much upon life or his position in it, taking everything with a cold, hopeless kind of acceptance, and laying no claim to courage, devotion, or even bare suffering. He had a certain dull prejudice in favour of honesty, would not have ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... ceased, Elsmere, after a hearty clap that set the room applauding likewise, turned not to the musician but the figure beside Mrs. Leyburn, the sister who had sat listening with an impassiveness, a sort of gentle remoteness of look, which had piqued his curiosity. The mother meanwhile was drinking in the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... and the real existence. But some of the hardiest and longest experience have some rules for conjectures; as, if they see a man with a shrouding sheet in the apparition, they will conjecture at the nearness or remoteness of his death by the more or less of his body that is covered by it. They will ordinarily see their absent friends, though at a great distance, sometimes no less than from America to Scotland, sitting, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous

... chapter, had suffered little essential modification in two hundred years. The original racial stock was still dominant. As compared with the middle and southern colonies, there was relatively little immigration, and this was easily assimilated. The physical remoteness of New England from other sections of the country, and the stubborn loyalty with which its inhabitants maintained their own standards of life, alike contributed to their sense of separateness. It is true, of course, that their mode of thinking ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... his situation who comes, after a long round of worthless or hardening experiences, upon a young, unsophisticated, innocent soul, is apt either to hold aloof, out of a sense of his own remoteness, or to draw near and become fascinated and elated by his discovery. It is only by a roundabout process that such men ever do draw near such a girl. They have no method, no understanding of how to ingratiate themselves in youthful favour, save when they find virtue in ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser

... potent. Spenser revived many of his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his Faery Queene, thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring Ben Jonson's censure, that he "writ no language." A poem that stands midway between Spenser and late mediaeval work of Chaucer's school—such as Hawes's Passetyme of Pleasure—was the Induction contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... perceive, with admiration, that the nearer we approach those countries which were once inhabited by the sons of Noah, in the greater perfection we find the arts and sciences; whereas they seem to be either neglected or forgotten, in proportion to the remoteness of nations from them; so that, when men attempted to revive those arts and sciences, they were obliged to go back to the source from whence they ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... of twenty-five, possibly, with a peculiar elegance, if I may so express it; great and admirable attention, as I recollect, when listening to any one; courteous recognition of others' convictions and even prejudices; and never a personal animosity of any kind—a certain remoteness of manner, however, that I think prevented persons from becoming acquainted with him as easily as ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke

... in the day; no mist or haze, in spite of the heat, shrouded or melted the distances; the trees and house-roofs of Maidenhead a mile away seemed as if a stretched-out finger could be laid on them. They were of Noah's Ark size; it was only minuteness that showed their remoteness. ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson

... education gives? Of course; and we should have them. Men fitted by nature for special pursuits in life will make preparation for that work. Water will find its level. Genius cannot be repressed. It will find an audience, even though the singer be Robert Burns at his plow in the remoteness of Ayr, or the philosophic AEsop in the humble garb of a Greek pedant's slave. Genius will take care of itself; it is the mass of mankind that must be led by the hand as we lead a small boy. It is therefore that I plead, that the masses of the colored race should receive such preparation for ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... of the most striking objects in the prospect; and the eye expatiated beyond from where the gneiss region begins, on a tract of broken hill and brown moor, uncheered by a single green field or human dwelling. There are traditions that, in their very peculiarity, and remoteness from the tract of ordinary intention, give evidence of their truth; and I now called up a tradition, which I owed to my friend the maniac, respecting the manner in which the Mackenzies of Fairburn and the Chisholms ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... breath. Only sometimes she let her strong imagination play utterly at its will. She let it go now as she and Smain turned into the golden diapered shadows of the little path and came into the swaying mystery of the trees. The longing for secrecy, for remoteness, for the beauty of far away had sometimes haunted her, especially in the troubled moments of her life. Her heart, oppressed, had overleaped the horizon line in answer to a calling from hidden things ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... with the woman,—who has probably been quite passive, and rarely with the man, who is ever the real transgressor. Having a man down after her at Nuncombe Putney! It had never struck Martha as very horrible that Brooke Burgess should fall in love with Dorothy in the city;—but this meeting, in the remoteness of the country, out of sight even of the village, was almost indecent; and all, too, with Miss Stanbury's will just, as one might say, on the balance! Dorothy ought to have buried herself rather ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... universe is but one coincidence—only where will has to be developed, there is need for human play, and room for that must be provided in its spaces. The works of God being from the beginning, and all his beginnings invisible either from greatness or smallness or nearness or remoteness, numberless coincidences may pass in every man's history, before he becomes capable of knowing either the need or the good of them, or ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... letter was one of those mares' nests of which gentlemen in Mr. Larkin's line of business have so large an experience. Of Mark Wylder not a trace was discoverable. His enquiries on this point were, of course, conducted with caution and remoteness. Gylingden, however, was one of those places which, if it knows anything, is sure to find a way of telling it, and the attorney was soon satisfied that Mark's secret visit had been conducted with sufficient caution to baffle the eyes and ears of the ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... terrestrial mammals in relation to the remoteness of islands from continents, there is also a relation, to a certain extent independent of distance, between the depth of the sea separating an island from the neighbouring mainland, and the presence in both of the same mammiferous species or of allied species ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... pendulum, a mere mathematical point, from its position of equilibrium: a perpetual oscillation is started, along which points are placed next to points, and moments succeed moments. The space and time which thus arise have no more "positivity" than the movement itself. They represent the remoteness of the position artificially given to the pendulum from its normal position, what it lacks in order to regain its natural stability. Bring it back to its normal position: space, time and motion shrink to a mathematical point. Just so, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... towns of Chester and Danton in southern Ohio. It was of ancient build, and had all the picturesquesness of age and the English traditions of its original builder. Though so near two thriving towns, it retained its own quality of apparent remoteness from city life and city ways. This in a measure was made possible by the nearness of the woods which almost enveloped it; but the character of the man who ran it had still more to do with it, his sympathies being entirely with the old, and not at all with the new, ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... interests of his own contemporary system. The very abstraction which has silently been performed by the mere effect of vast distances, wildernesses that swallow up armies, and mighty rivers that are unbridged, together with the indefinite chronological remoteness, do already of themselves translate such sequestered and insulated chambers of history into the character of moral apologues, where the sole surviving interest lies in the quality of the particular moral illustrated, or in the sudden ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... to let him join the army, but was told, peremptorily, not to interrupt the first year of his studies. He submitted, and plunged into the study of the literature of the Romanticists, which, in its remoteness from actuality, offered distraction from his disappointment. During this time he fell ill of typhoid fever, from which he did not fully recover until the campaign had victoriously ended in the battle of Leipzig. He joined, however, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... reluctant. But it may be questioned whether this temporary reluctance of the grocer is a good thing, or evidence of a good condition of poetic feeling in the grocery business as a whole. There certainly should be an ideal image of health and happiness in any trade, and its remoteness from the reality is not the only important question. No one supposes that the mass of traditional conceptions of duty and glory are always operative, for example, in the mind of a soldier or a doctor; that the Battle of Waterloo ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... of Greek literature newly discovered in the fifteenth century by the western world. In 1423 an Italian scholar brought 238 Greek manuscripts to Italy. In 1453 the Turks captured Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire and the headquarters of Grecian learning. Because of the remoteness of this capital, English literature had not been greatly influenced by Greece. When Constantinople fell, many of her scholars went to Italy, taking with them precious Grecian manuscripts. As Englishmen often visited Italy, they soon began to study Grecian masterpieces, and to fall under the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... were rising, and his basket was half full before he looked around him. It is wonderful, when you are fishing, how great a distance you can walk without noticing it. He had followed the winding course of the stream until it had left the road far behind and struck into a valley, the wildness, the remoteness of which was almost awe-inspiring; and he stood still for a moment and looked up at the sky into which the tall, sharp peaks of the hills lost themselves. The stream, broken by huge boulders, rumbled with a soft roar which was the only sound ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice

... nose, or for being a plutocrat even when he happens to be a pauper." Pity and bitterness abound in these lines, but they are written by a detached spectator. He did not know how much of the Jew there was in him even in this feeling of remoteness from a world which offered him ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl

... little value, was once present: and he who would form a sound judgment, must look upon every part of our lives as present in its turn, and not suffer his opinion to be warped by the consideration of the nearness or remoteness of the object ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... afforded violent contrasts and equal elements of good and mischief. If Emineh, his wife, was a model of virtue, his father-in-law, Capelan, was a composition of every vice—selfish, ambitious, turbulent, fierce. Confident in his courage, and further emboldened by his remoteness from the capital, the Pacha of Delvino gloried in setting law ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... straight into his soul, divining all his thoughts. But these bursts of emotion were rare. Generally the youth regarded Medinskaya with adoration, admiring everything in her—her beauty, her words, her dresses. And beside this adoration there was in him a painfully keen consciousness of his remoteness from her, of her supremacy ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... of the time. He would there, perchance, learn more of her, of her home, of her life, of her friends. But would he excite in her the interest she was exciting in him? The thought of his possible remoteness from her, pained him and made his heart sink. The noblest characters experience strange sensations of desolation and wretchedness at the thought of disapproval and rejection. Esteem, the testimony of our neighbor's appreciation, the approval of those worth while, these are the things ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett

... than seeing them with the immediate eye. A child's shoe, the doll, sitting in her little wicker-carriage, all objects that have been used or played with during the day, though still as familiar as ever, are invested with something like strangeness and remoteness. I cannot in any measure express it. Then the somewhat dim coal fire throws its unobtrusive tinge through the room,—a faint ruddiness upon the wall,—which has a not unpleasant effect in taking from the colder spirituality ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various

... high, grass-crowned hill we swept all the surrounding country;—toward the east spread a vast sea of verdure, rolled into gentle hollows and ridges, broken by the red roofs of Rivas, San Jorge, and Obraja; and beyond all, the lake stretching into misty remoteness, with its islands, and the ever-notable volcanoes, Madeira and Ometepec, rising abruptly out of it. It was a glorious scene, worthy of reverie. But we must scan it as Milton's Devil—to compare us with one far above us—did ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... shaking hands with a woman who shared the features of the woman in the portrait, but who differed from her in that she was fair, lacked her alluring remoteness and had much more of youth to her credit. Whereas the woman in the portrait looked uncapturable, Maisie's charm lay in her accessibility—the genial promise she held out of being willing and even eager to surrender. Her every tone and gesture proclaimed her anxiety ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... apt to accompany other kinds of enjoyment; such as the satisfaction of the appetites and other needs. To this purity of aesthetic pleasure must be added its refinement, which implies not merely a certain remoteness from the bodily needs, but the effect of a union of sense and mind in giving amplitude as well as delicacy to our enjoyment ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... and the standard compass, owing to its remoteness from iron in this position, is placed on the top of the ice-house. The steersman, however, steers by a binnacle compass placed aft in front of his wheel. But these two compasses for various reasons do not read alike at a given moment, while the standard is the ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... mating And shadows quiver noiseless 'neath the courtyard trees, Cool keeps the gloom where the suppliants are waiting Begging little favors of Jinendra on their knees. Peace over all, and the consciousness of nearness, Charity removing the remoteness of the gods; Spirit of compassion breathing with new clearness "There's a limit set to khama; there's a surcease from the rods." "Blessed were the few, who trim the lights of kindness, Toiling in the temple for the love of one and all, If it ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy

... sceptical school, many well-intentioned men have apprehended, its effects might be the same. We have, therefore, attempted briefly to distinguish the sources whence these different writings have issued, and, we trust, we have pointed out their remoteness from each other. And we do not dwell on the subject, at greater length, because Johnson's writings, in various parts, will require our attention on this particular head. To be restless and weary of the dull details and incomplete enjoyments of life, is common to all lofty minds. Frederick ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... Headley was of a different opinion. He thought that the very remoteness of his post, rendered it the more necessary that no appearance of carelessness should be remarked by the tribes of Indians, who were in the vicinity, and who, however amicable their relations THEN with the United States, might later, ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson

... where time is unrecognised, and turbulence of emotion, whether of grief or gladness, is felt to be out of place in a dream-being, whose sole reality is its unreality. Their personal unimportance to the Universe, and remoteness from the Market-place of Life allow them to dawdle. Their experiences have no sharp edges, no abrupt precipices, no divisive gulfs, no defined beginnings and endings. The book of their sojourn in ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson

... is irrepressible. Slavery, evil as it was, when looked at from the remoteness of human history as it is to be, will be judged an institution that gave development to a certain ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various

... old mood slipped away like a garment no longer needed: her days were set to melody, and her nights to pleasant dreams. The jangle of street cars and the twinges of conscience, the noises of her native city, and her heart searchings in the Little Church of All the Saints faded to the remoteness of a faint gray bar of cloud that makes the sunset brighter in the west. She went singing among the olives or past the fountain under the ilexes on the hill: duties and perplexities vanished in the clear sunshine and pleasant shadow ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood

... from the ideal states of Plato and, on the other, from modern sketches of desirable societies. Plato and Aristotle conceived their constructions within the geographical limits of Hellas, either in the past or in the present. More, Bacon, and Campanella placed theirs in distant seas, and this remoteness in space helped to create a certain illusion, of reality. [Footnote: Civitas Solis, p. 461 (ed. 1620). Expectancy of end of world: Ib. p. 455.] The modern plan is to project the perfect society into a period of future time. The device of More and his successors was ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... of men and last of freemen. —Recessus—famae. Our very remoteness and obscurity. This is the most common and perhaps the most simple translation, making sinus famaeseclusion in respect to fame. Perhaps, however, it accords as well with the usual signification of the words, and better with the connexion and spirit of the speech, ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... another job where I'll have more time to myself than one day a week," confessed Banneker, having in mind possible magazine work. He thought of the pleasant remoteness of The Retreat. It was expensive; it would involve frequent taxi charges. But, as ever, Banneker had an unreasoning faith in a financial providence of supply. "Yes: I'll come in," he said. "That is, if ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... an estate of farm and moorland, worth some three or four thousand a year, and the house was perched on a beautiful promontory, running out into the sea, and inclosing one side of a bay, where a small fishing-village had recently expanded into a quiet watering-place, esteemed by some for its remoteness from railways, and for the calm and simplicity that were yearly diminished by its increasing popularity. It was the family fashion to look down from their crag at the new esplanade with pity and contempt for the ruined loneliness of the pebbly beach; ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... at the devastation. Not a single chair, table, sofa, etagere or console had been left in the state rooms of the Intendencia. His Excellency, though twitching all over with rage, was restrained from bursting into violence by a sense of his remoteness and isolation. His heroic brother was very far away. Meantime, how was he going to take his siesta? He had expected to find comfort and luxury in the Intendencia after a year of hard camp life, ending with the hardships and privations of the daring dash upon Sulaco—upon ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... and not a few princesses called him Felix, and spoke familiarly of the hotel as 'Felix's'; and Felix had found that this was very good for trade. The Grand Babylon was managed accordingly. The 'note' of its policy was discretion, always discretion, and quietude, simplicity, remoteness. The place was like a palace incognito. There was no gold sign over the roof, not even an explanatory word at the entrance. You walked down a small side street off the Strand, you saw a plain brown building ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett

... watched her as tenderly as a mother, sometimes asked himself if after all he and Jim had done the right thing. Her remoteness worried him. She seemed to live in a world of her own, asking no questions, making no confidences. Not that she ever barred him out. He was well aware that she had not the vaguest desire to keep him at a distance. But her old spontaneity, her child-like ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell

... the remoteness in the popular conception of the relation of literature to life, we must not neglect to take into account what may be called the arrogance of culture, an arrogance that has been emphasized, in these days of reaction ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... that the book gained thereby in value as a permanent addition to literature, the plot, powerful though it is, being of importance secondary to the creation of an atmosphere which should soften the outlines and remove the whole theme into a suitable remoteness from the domain of matter-of-fact. The Eternal City is, after all, as vital a portion of the story as are the adventures of Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and Donatello. They could not have existed and played their parts in any other city ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... My HOME, lonesomeness! Too long have I lived wildly in wild remoteness, to return ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... one of those characters, the best of which is the result of long trains of cause and effect—needing a certain spaciousness of time, and perhaps even remoteness, to properly enclose them—having unequal'd influence on the shaping of this Republic (and therefore the world) as to-day, and then far more important in the future. Thus the time has by no means yet come for a thorough measurement of him. Nevertheless, we ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... of the journey and the remoteness of the place. I was to be discouraged in every sentence. I was to carry his affectionate regards to the family in America and say that ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post

... in the midst of my great blank, while her handsome eyes rested upon me. In them was that look of a certain inquiry and a certain remoteness with which one pauses, in a museum, before some specimen ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister

... a classical epithet. Cf. indomitique Dahae, Verg. Aen. VIII. 728. The warlike and nomadic character of the Scythians increased in the mind their geographical remoteness. The Parthians are supposed to have sprung from Scythian exiles. The two races occupied the vast ...
— Esther • Jean Racine

... COMMUNITY The Conference acknowledges that the outermost regions of the Community (the French overseas departments, Azores and Madeira and Canary Islands) suffer from major structural backwardness compounded by several phenomena (remoteness, island status, small size, difficult topography and climate, economic dependence on a few products), the permanence and combination of which severely restrain their economic and social development. It considers that, while the provisions of the Treaty establishing the European ...
— The Treaty of the European Union, Maastricht Treaty, 7th February, 1992 • European Union

... established in the capital was confiscated, and turned over to Trinity College as a training school. Fifteen religious houses, chiefly belonging to the Franciscan Order, which had hitherto escaped from the remoteness of their situation, were, by an order of the English Council, confiscated to the Crown, and their novices compelled to emigrate in order to complete their studies abroad. A reprimand from the King somewhat stayed the ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... Rochester,—which place I had selected for my debut because of its remoteness from home,—I looked in, the evening of my arrival, to see the performances at the theatre. It was a hall of humble dimensions, seating an audience of five or six hundred. The piece was a travesty of "Hamlet," neither edifying nor amusing. A ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... and the limousine headed straight on into Surrey, he decided that there had been no doubling, but that the house to which he had been taken lay in one of these unsuspected country backwaters, which, while they are literally within sight of the lights of London, have nevertheless a remoteness as complete as ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer

... and his visual range appeared foreshortened, as though the utter distances had lengthened, bringing closer the edge of things. The twin peaks seemed endlessly distant and hazy, while the air had thickened as though congested with possibilities, lending a remoteness to the landscape. ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach

... Tables, which, with the simplicity proper to all legislation, conferred reciprocal rights of succession on all agnates alike, whether males or females, and excluded no degree by reason merely of its remoteness, after the analogy of family heirs; but it was introduced by the jurists who came between the Twelve Tables and the imperial legislation, and who with their legal subtleties and refinements excluded females other than sisters ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian

... lack of modern influence in the sacred city, but as yet it is merely a veneer which has been lightly superimposed upon its ancient civilization, leaving almost untouched the basic customs of its people. This has been due to the remoteness of Mongolia. Until a few years ago, when motor cars first made their way across the seven hundred miles of plains, the only access from the south was by camel caravan, and the monotonous trip offered little inducement to casual travelers. The ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews

... of Dramatic Reality. A romantic allegory like 'The Faerie Queene' does not aim at intense lifelikeness—a certain remoteness from the actual is one of its chief attractions. But sometimes in Spenser's poem the reader feels too wide a divorce from reality. Part of this fault is ascribable to the use of magic, to which there is ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... by philosophers, that all bodies, which discover themselves to the eye, appear as if painted on a plain surface, and that their different degrees of remoteness from ourselves are discovered more by reason than by the senses. When I hold up my hand before me, and spread my fingers, they are separated as perfectly by the blue colour of the firmament, as they coued be by any visible object, which I coued place betwixt them. In ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume

... thought that perhaps the spirits of the former pharaohs had settled in the heart of their heir. It must be so, for otherwise whence could such a feeling of age or remoteness settle down in him? And why did governing the state seem today a simple thing, while two months before he was alarmed when he thought that ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... thus becoming the best as well as the first of our satirical poets. His style—imitated from Persius and Juvenal—is too elliptical, and it becomes true of him as well as of Persius that his points are often sheathed through the remoteness of his allusions and the perplexity of his diction. He is very recondite in his images, and you are sometimes reminded of one storming in English at a Hindoo—it is pointless fury, boltless thunder. At other times ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... unfaltering, and clear as the voice of faith ever should be, the hymn went forward in the room below, his memory supplying the well-known words that were lost from remoteness:— ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... arm over my neck; there was the calming austerity of death on his lips, that just touched my ear and departed, together with the far-away sound of the words, losing themselves in the remoteness of ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... Metcalfe and his engine were soon to proceed to make the acquaintance of other friends and admirers further along the line. Llanbrynmair was soon to be reached, and another writer in the local Press is moved to compare its former remoteness, "verging close upon the classic 'Ultima Thule' of the first Roman," with the new conditions. "The railway," he says, "with its snorting, puffing and Vesuvian volumes of clouds, now to a certain extent breaks upon the whilom ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine

... one, and had been chosen for its remoteness from the dwelling rooms. It had formed the billiard room, which the former owner of Weald Lodge had added to his premises, and John Minute, who had neither the time nor the patience for billiards, had readily handed over this damp annex to his ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace

... belong anywhere! It has no belongings about it! At this moment it is absolutely more retired and shut out from communication with the civilized world than Hawaii or any of the other islands of the Pacific sea. In seclusion and remoteness, New Mexico may press hard on the character and condition of Typee. And its people are infinitely less elevated, in morals and condition, than the people of the Sandwich Islands. We had much better have Senators from Oahu. They are far less intelligent than ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... of space what Mr. Hovey takes half an acre of paper for. And all that he really does on the half-acre of paper is to bring back to one again and again that set and focused look one sees in Mr. Morgan's eyes—the remoteness, the silence, the amazing, dogged, implacable concentration, and, when all is said, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... of 1843, Cooper had pretty well reduced the press to silence, so far as comments on his character were concerned. It was insignificance or remoteness alone that protected the libeler. The leading newspapers of the state, however much they might abuse his writings, learned to be very cautious of what they said of him personally. But it was a barren victory he had won. ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... undertaken, in conjunction with the late Dr. Laurence, to examine the manuscript papers of Mr. Burke, and to select and prepare for the press such of them as should be thought proper for publication, the difficulties attending our cooeperation were soon experienced by us. The remoteness of our places of residence in summer, and our professional and other avocations in winter, opposed perpetual obstacles to the progress of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... powerfulness is hidden under a smooth calmness of surface—to watch all this is to intimately taste a great delicious joy of life. The researches of the historian of bygone times are fascinating—absorbingly fascinating, although he is always handicapped by remoteness; but the historian of to-day—of his day—this day—whose day-page of history is read by hundreds of readers, the day after has set to him a task that calls for all, and more than all, that he can give—stimulates while ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch

... impressions after the crisis was a sense of my actual remoteness, in normal circumstances, from Constance. Her father had left Constance a quite sufficient income. Mrs. Van Homrey was in her own right comfortably well-to-do. But, despite the exiguous nature of my own resources, it was not the money question which impressed me most in this connection, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... longevity; but is China a nation in the usual meaning of the word? Certainly, she is not a great nation. It is true that no other nation has actually conquered her of late; but this has been largely by reason of her remoteness from the active world, and because other nations imposed their will upon her, without meeting any resistance that required the use of war to overcome. And even China has not lived a wholly peaceful ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske

... of every chance, however remote. Perhaps my plan was mad, but it accomplished what I wanted. Years before I had travelled through the mountain districts of North Carolina. One day, in riding through the country roads, I had realised their strange remoteness from the world, and the fancy had crossed my mind that a criminal who dressed and lived as the rudely scattered population did, and who chose a lonely spot in the woods, might be safer there than with the ocean rolling between him and his secret. ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... charm, that they combine in one exquisite presentation the passions that are living with the picturesqueness that is dead. And when we have the modern spirit given to us in an antique form, the very remoteness of that form can be made a method of increased realism. This was Shakespeare's own attitude towards the ancient world, this is the attitude we in this century should adopt towards his plays, and ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... another grey day, close and still, and the murmur of the calm sea threw her at once into a dreamy state, full of pleasurable excitement. She hid herself in a spot most soothing from its apparent remoteness, a sandy cove from which, because of the projecting cliffs on either hand, neither town nor coast could be seen, but only the sea and sky. Although the grey was uniform enough to make it impossible to tell where cloud met water on the horizon, it was not dull, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... what was said to him as the three sat down, a little forlorn, as the late summer twilight began to close over all the brightness of that long fatiguing day. The evening of the wedding, with its sense already of remoteness to the great event of the morning so much prepared for and looked forward to—with the atmosphere so dead and preternaturally silent which has tingled with so much emotion, with the inevitable reaction after ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... knowing that he had a new neighbour. Everything about him was gray: his thin, concave face, his expressionless eyes, his sparse hair and straggling moustache, his clothes, and his hands, knotted on the back like the roots of trees. His grayness and the bleak remoteness of his air made him seem unreal as a spirit come back to haunt the scene of long-ago triumphs or defeats. Mary could almost have persuaded herself that he did not exist, and that the pale form and glassy eyes were visible ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... entrance into the main canon to become possessed of a corral completely closed in. Remembering the absolute invisibility of these sunken canons until the rider is almost directly over them, and also the extreme roughness and remoteness of the district, I could see that the spot ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White

... his cap politely, for though the woman was not fashionably dressed, she was distinguished in appearance, with an air of remoteness which gave her a kind ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... of Percy and Nevil, were the first to break that internal tranquillity which the kingdom had hitherto enjoyed, without the slightest interruption, under the wise and vigorous rule of Elizabeth. The remoteness of these noblemen from the court and capital, with the poverty and consequent simplicity, almost barbarism, of the vassals over whom they bore sway, and whose homage they received like native and independent princes, appears to have nourished in their minds ideas of their ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... months. Her delicate beauty, her culture, her elegance, her rank, all charmed and fascinated him; but her sympathy with Erin was irresistible. It was not the first time that he had been in love, by a great many times. The list of the idols he had worshipped stretched backwards to the dim remoteness of boyhood. But to-day, awakening all at once to a keen perception of his hapless state, he told himself that he had never loved before ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... seventy-nine miles—how many meadows and corn-fields, hedges and woods, in that distance?—wide enough to seclude any house, to hide it, like an acorn in the grass. Those who have lived all their lives in remote places do not feel the remoteness. No one else seemed to be conscious of the breadth that separated the place from the great centre, but it was, perhaps, that consciousness which deepened the solitude to me. It made the silence more ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... known it, and for shame have scarce dared to own it, in highland glens, in the loneliness of an island in the western sea, in a green valley amongst the "solemn, kindly, round-backed hills" of the Scottish Border, in the remoteness of the Australian bush. They have no reasons to give—or their reasons are far-fetched. Only, to them as to Mowgli, Fear came, and the fear seemed to them to come from a malignant something from which they must ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... prophet. Certain Pharisees, under the pretence of regard for Jesus, came to tell him that Antipas was seeking to kill him. Jesus, notwithstanding his great simplicity, saw the snare, and did not depart.[2] His peaceful manners, and his remoteness from popular agitation, ultimately reassured the Tetrarch and dissipated ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... small numbers, their remoteness from lines of travel, and their unwarlike character the Ad['a]i have cut but a small figure in history, and accordingly the known facts regarding them are very meager. The first historical mention of them appears to be by Cabeca de Vaca, who in his "Naufragios," referring ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell

... the quite unaffected conception that the lowly are on a plane of equality with the so-called upper classes. When the Englishman Dickens wrote with his profound pity and understanding of the poor, there was yet a bit; of remoteness, perhaps, even, a bit of caricature, in his treatment of them. He showed their sufferings to the rest of the world with a "Behold how the other half lives!" The Russian writes of the poor, as it ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... a moment alone, whispering remoteness. Then, like a voice far off in a blue distance, there came again from Rosamund, more softly and ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... cold remoteness of the North are many of his kind—the black sheep, the undesirables, the discards of the pack. Their lips are sealed; their eyes are cold as glaciers, and often they drink deep. Oh, they are a mighty company, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... action and initiative unknown in the provincial governors of Gaul, and if, centuries later, Roman Catholicism in England maintained a similar independence towards the Holy See, both facts have their cause in the remoteness of Britain from the center of political or ecclesiastical power in Rome. If the independence of the Roman consul in Britain was duplicated later by the attitude of the Thirteen Colonies toward England, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... is done to avoid the danger of the trains being shelled by Austrian submarines! (Imagine, if you please, the passengers on the New York-Boston trains being ordered to keep their windows darkened because enemy submarines have been reported off the coast.) In this war remoteness from the firing-line does not assure safety. Spezia, for example, which is a naval base of the first importance, is separated from the firing-line by the width of the Italian peninsula. Until a few months ago its inhabitants felt as snug and safe as though they lived in Spain. ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell

... trouble, politically, than the ignorance of the negro, for that latter is not as yet armed with the suffrage. Of course there is not much enthusiasm about sending teachers South to teach the poor whites, so the negro suffers from the magnitude of the undertaking, from his remoteness from view, and the general disposition among mankind to let everybody hoe their own weeds so long as they ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various

... making his way in one of the colonies. Then followed a summary of the deductions resulting from the evidence about to be adduced, and which carried upon its face the inference that the absence of the cousin, the remoteness of the room, the sight of a large sum of money, and the helplessness of the old man, had proved temptations too strong for a fiery and impatient youth, long fretted by the restraints of his situation, ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... at the time of independence from the UK in 1979. Copra and fish now represent the bulk of production and exports. The economy has fluctuated widely in recent years. Economic development is constrained by a shortage of skilled workers, weak infrastructure, and remoteness from international markets. Tourism provides more than one-fifth of GDP. The financial sector is at an early stage of development as is the expansion of private sector initiatives. Foreign financial aid from UK, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and China ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... and its characters to a keener study and a more sensitive psychological judgment than the simple things were originally meant to bear. So that many characters which passed as heroic, or at least presentable, in the kindly remoteness of legend, reveal some strange weakness when brought suddenly into the light. When the tradition is Satyric, as here, the same process produces almost an opposite effect. It is somewhat as though the main plot of a gross and jolly farce were pondered ...
— Alcestis • Euripides

... probably the reason why it has been fixed upon as the place of the Transfiguration, as it is not mentioned by name in the New Testament. The words are: "an high mountain apart," which some suppose to refer to the position of the mountain, and not to the remoteness of Christ and the three Disciples from men. The sides of the mountain are covered with clumps of oak, hawthorn and other trees, in many places overrun with the white honeysuckle, its fingers dropping with odor of nutmeg ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... sail and oar.' It is not fair to dwell upon the eminent beauties of the History of the World without at the same time acknowledging that the book almost wilfully deprives itself of legitimate value and true human interest by the remoteness of the period which it describes, and by the tiresome pedantry of its method. It is leisurely to the last excess. The first chapter, of seven long sections, takes us but to the close of the Creation. We cannot proceed without knowing what it is that Tostatus affirms of ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... Variety of incident, remoteness of scene, and all the incredible things in the world, had been at the disposal of medieval authors long before the French Romantic Schools began to define themselves. The wonders of the East, especially, had very early come into literature; and the Anglo-Saxon Epistle of Alexander seems ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... supper-room for more cups of coffee. But that minute had set its seal on his heart for ever. She was sitting there alone with her side to the entrance, so that he had to pass around in order to face her. Her elegance and a certain air she had of remoteness from the scene of which she was the glowing center when she smiled, awed him and made his hand loosen a little on the slender stiletto he held close against the bottom of the tray. But such resolution does not easily yield, and his fingers soon tightened ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green

... change in the atmosphere. The room was densely filled with silence, which folded her about coldly. She sank down on a chair. She sat motionless, looking at what lay there so quiet, at the unimaginable emptiness and remoteness ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher



Words linked to "Remoteness" :   unsociableness, far cry, farness, remote, unapproachability, aloofness, distance, withdrawnness, unsociability, standoffishness, nearness



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