"close and distant" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when you want to refer to two parts of something that are related but distinct from each other. For example, "The relationship between them was close and distant at the same time."
That makes looking at photographs of grief a strangely close and distant activity.
These adoptees send swabs of cells in search of close and distant family.
A 2008 study found that smoking behavior spreads through both close and distant social ties; one person's resolve and success can help the people around them quit too.
As Durant became a global star, one of the best players in the world, acquaintances both close and distant sprouted, all wanting something.
The study also reveals that participants have both a close and distant relationship to objects and that they prefer products that allow them to be engaged in the activity of "doing".
Simple knowledge diffuses equally to close and distant actors because distant recipients with poor connections to the source of the knowledge can compensate for their limited access by means of unaided local search.
Using new diversity measures enabled by our framework, we discover groups of both phylogenetically close and distant bacterial taxa that exhibit consensus responses to antibiotic exposure across multiple human subjects.
This may be because of an increasingly well-known social-network illusion that people infer something is popular when they observe that people like it who are both close and distant.
Looking for signs of the futuristic, multi-level Newcastle of T Dan Smith seems like a strange form of archaeology, an attempt to access a past that feels simultaneously close and distant.
As a novel it is no more conventional than her others, but in its vivid compactness, the way it marbles and integrates the close and distant sensations and memories of one mind, it is a kind of artistic zenith.
Ancestry.com, a division of MyFamily.com in Provo, Utah, has spurred interaction between close and distant relatives by letting them more freely share information about their forebears and post old photos, and it is also considering a family subscription service.
