from: Vidar-Madjar, Alfred, OÙ ALLONS-NOUS VIVRE DEMAIN, Hugo & Cie, Paris, 2009.

You really don’t know how far stars are, but you suspect they are really very far.
If from Paris, you imagine our dear earth the size of a pin point, the moon would be a second pin point, two centimeters beside it, our awesome sun , a beautiful orange
five meters away, thus almost in the same room as you. The star nearest you, another orange surrounded by a few pin points some ten meters around it, but outside of France, 1,300 kilometers from Paris, let’s say in Rome for example. So take up the sun autoroute with your two pin points and your orange and make the trip to Rome where you will finally meet up with the first other orange similar to our sun, the star nearest our Solar System. Between the two, nothing, not even a few pint points loitering here and there. You are starting to appreciate, very vaguely, but a little bit better, how far stars are from us.