But in Karmel and other hamlets in the brown hills here, these projects seem like a distant abstraction.

But Lindsey, who symbolizes that love, is more of a distant abstraction than a believable character, and Tom's anguish can become cloyingly self-indulgent.

As long as the military remains an all-volunteer force, they say, war and death could remain distant abstractions for most Americans.

She would be hearing it too, not as a thin, distant abstraction, but loudly and with all the richness of presence.

Nineteen can be an age of imagined invulnerability, when illness and health seem distant abstractions.

The Hamptons were a distant abstraction.

For political figures, they were abstractions far more distant than their closely held ideas.

Against those concerns, originality can seem a distant abstraction, at best a sideshow.

He brings his large, distant abstractions - prehistory, a dystopic future, religion, death - up close, segmenting them into tangible and particular fictional parcels.

Homeowners remain frustrated and baffled that the distant abstractions of third-world poverty and federal immigration policy have hit home so literally.