Grainy Quotes & Sayings

Kestrel could read an expression as if looking through shifting water to see the grainy bottom, the silt rising or settling, the dart of a fish. — Marie Rutkoski

A sweeping vista of Northern sky opens up between the warehouses and hangs motionless above the cobbled streets. It's a world of unrequited love beneath the smoke stacks and awkward moments in the underpass. A great crashing wave of romantic despair that washes over my dramatic heart, dousing it with a thin grey rinse. I'm James Dean, I'm Albert Camus, I posture in doorways with a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth. My great iron bedstead, my kitchen sink drama, the grainy black and white days of this life... — Neil Schiller

What about - not sex - but love?"
"Love is another name for sex."
"Like love of country," Rick said. "Love of music."
"If it's love toward a woman or an android imitation, it's sex. Wake up and face yourself, Deckard. You wanted to go to bed with a female type of android - nothing more, nothing less. I felt that way, on one occasion. When I had just started bounty hunting. Don't let it get you down; you'll heal. What's happened is that you've got your order reversed. Don't kill her - or be present when she's killed - and then feel physically attracted. Do it the other way."
Rick stared at him. "Go to bed with her first - "
" - and then kill her," Phil Resch said succinctly. His grainy, hardened smile remained. — Philip K. Dick

No one knew what Rodney King had done beforehand to be stopped. No one realized that he was a parolee and that he was violating his parole. No one knew any of those things. All they saw was this grainy film and police officers hitting him over the head. — Daryl Gates

Agent Jones switched to the big screen and a grainy video of MoMo sitting at his enormous desk, a swivel-hipped Elvis clock ticking behind his bewigged head. 'Death to the capitalist pigs! Death to your cinnamon bun-smelling malls! Death to your power walking and automatic car windows and I'm With Stupid T-shirts! The Republic of ChaCha will never bend to your side-of-fries -drive -through-please-oh-would-you-like-ketchup-with-that corruption! MoMo B. ChaCha defies you and all you stand for, and one day, you will crumble into the sea and we will pick up the pieces and make them into sand art. — Libba Bray

When people think of slavery, they think of an era from the distant past. Grainy photographs from Civil War times. And yet it goes on. — Lisa Kristine

She thought of the grainy video of him she had seen, head tipped back, so covered in blood that she hadn't remembered his features, hadn't remembered him as looking like anything but a monster, laughing, endlessly laughing.
Mad as a dog. Mad as a god. — Holly Black

Most theorists suspect that space has an intricate structure - that it is 'grainy' - but that this structure is on a much finer scale than any known subatomic particle. The structure could be of an exotic kind: extra dimensions, over and above the three that we are used to (up and down, backward and forward, left and right). — Martin Rees

I remember always being baffled by other children. I would be at a birthday party and watch the other kids giggling and making faces, and I would try to do that, too, but I wouldn't understand why. I would site there with the tight elastic thread of the birthday hat parting the pudge of my underchin, with the grainy frosting of the cake bluing my teeth, and I would try to figure out why it was fun. — Gillian Flynn

The New York book was a visual diary and it was also kind of personal newspaper. I wanted it to look like the news. I didn't relate to European photography. It was too poetic and anecdotal for me ... the kinetic quality of new york, the kids, dirt, madness - I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I would be grainy and contrasted and black. Id crop, blur, play with the negatives. I didn't see clean technique being right for New York. I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News. — William Klein

It's the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it's all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress--it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass! — Wendy McClure

They were grainy things, soot and chalk. They could have been anybody. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I think a persons life is supposed to be like a DVD. You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the directors cut-the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way. There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you've survived, or the minutes you've been stuck there. Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes. Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over. — Jodi Picoult

Cheese. Cheeeeeese. What a thin, flat, nasal-sounding word for such a luscious, rich, gorgeous thing. Hard. Soft. Ripe. Grainy. Creamy. Often stinky. I'd yet to find a cheese I didn't adore. — Alice Clayton

Come to the stable. Come to where the horses are, and the sweet, grainy, pungent smells. — Monica Dickens

I felt tired and grainy and not able to tell how much damage had been done to me. I had a leaden feeling that it was more than I really needed. — Stephen King

I've never had much interest in spinoffery - the idea of writing in someone else's universe generally leaves me cold - but 'Doctor Who' is different. I've grown up with it. It's been part of my life since I was tiny, watching Jon Pertwee on a grainy black and white television in Cornwall and being terrified out of my mind. — Alastair Reynolds

A primary reason that people believe that life is getting worse is because our information about the problems of the world has steadily improved. If there is a battle today somewhere on the planet, we experience it almost as if we were there. During
World War II, tens of thousands of people might perish in a battle, and if the public could see it at all it was in a grainy newsreel in a movie theater weeks later. During World War I a small elite could read about the progress of the conflict in the newspaper
(without pictures). During the nineteenth century there was almost no access to news in a timely fashion for anyone. — Ray Kurzweil

One of the consequences of the Iranian revolution has been an explosion of history. A country once known only from British consular reports and intrepid travelogues is now awash with historical documents, letters, diaries, grainy video, weblogs and secret police files of questionable authenticity. — James Buchan

There were days, rainy gray days, when the streets of Brooklyn were worthy of a photograph, every window the lens of a Leica, the view grainy and immoble. We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed. We lay in each other's arms, still awkward but happy, exchanging breathless kisses into sleep. — Patti Smith

One of my earliest recollections is being woken up at some ungodly hour in the morning by my parents and sat in front of the fairly new black and white television, watching a grainy image of a man in a white suit climbing down a ladder. It was the first moon landing, and I became a sort of spaceman, as many kids were. — Charles Stross

People want to see something authentic. If it's too polished and highly produced, people might not trust it as much. If it's grainy, if it's coming from a webcam, if it's someone standing there and talking their mind or sharing their thoughts, people trust it much more. — Chad Hurley

Most of us remember Nat King Cole as a vocalist. His warm, grainy baritone is still so closely identified with such familiar ballads as 'Stardust' and 'The Christmas Song' that it's hard to imagine anyone else performing them. — Terry Teachout

He wasn't a romantic. Had never thought himself as sentimental. But he wanted this one last kiss.
"Well", he said, his voice hoarse and grainy, "we'll always have Peru. — Cindy Gerard

Snow as fine and grainy as sugar covered the windows in and sifted off to the floor and did not melt. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

Cereal is food, sort of. It tastes grainy, easy and light, with a hint of false fruitiness. It tastes the way America feels. — Gary Shteyngart

Winston knew better than to give a heartfelt synopsis of a grainy black-and-white film that had inadvertently touched his heart and caused him to empathize with a loafer-shod French boy, Doinel, the young, unloved Parisian, running toward the sea in the last reel. Winston had wanted to chase behind him, clasp him on the shoulder ... — Paul Beatty

I jammed my hand in my jacket pocket, bracing myself fo the next hit, and fel something. Something grainy and samll, sticking to the tips of my fingers: the sand from Commons Park.
Oh Cass, I thought. I miss you so, so much. — Sarah Dessen

[I]t's guilty of the very thing that makes kids hate history as a subject when it's taught badly: The Da Vinci Code makes the past feel like a dull, grainy, faraway thing, instead of something vibrant and alive. — Stephanie Zacharek

Did you see him? I know the photo was grainy, but he looks like one of those death metal goth heads, or whatever they're called. All dressed in black with long hair
I took umbrage at my mother describing my boyfriend this way. John was the Lord of the Underworld. How else was he supposed to dress? — Meg Cabot

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them. — Brian Eno

Dead is dead, we know where to file another person's extinction, but the artist purposely zoomed in on the living, or, to be more accurate, the forced-to-be-living and the soon-to-be-dead. Grainy — Gary Shteyngart

The light was grainy, dusty; it looked like the Milky Way had spread from the top of the sky all down the west, and the tented shapes of the mountains were huge and satin black against it, and the ridgeline trees made a filigree of onyx. The wind had increased but not cooled; the promise of full summer was in it. And when Dr. Barcroft turned from the west to look again at the house, he was hardly surprised to see that it had begun to turn like a wheel upon a vertical axle as the silhouettes of the dancers raced past window after window. It was as if their dancing, the female slide and shuffle, the masculine drum and thunder, propelled the house behind them; it had become a merry-go-round, turning steadily and stately as the music went just a little bit faster, just a little more, and he could tell there were furies in it, whirlwinds and cyclones and hurricanes that Quigley's fiddle barely held in check, that his calling could barely control. — Fred Chappell

If you would just listen to me . . . if you would just look at the pictures I took - "
"We've seen them, Miss Maxwell. Several times already. Frankly, nothing you've said tonight checks out - not your statement, and not these grainy, unreadable images from your cell phone."
"I'm sorry if the quality is lacking," Gabrielle replied, acidly. "The next time I'm witnessing a blood slaughter by a gang of psychos, I'll have to remember to bring my Leica and a few extra lenses. — Lara Adrian

On the first floor near the foot of the stairs, we have placed on the wall an antique mirror so old that it can't reflect anything anymore. Its surface, worn down to nubbled grainy gray stubs, has lost one of its dimensions. like me, its glimmerless. You can't see into it now, just past it. Depth has been replace by texture. The mirror gives back nothing and makes no productive claim upon anyone. The mirror has been so completely worn away that you have to learn to live with what it refuses to do. That's its beauty. — Charles Baxter

Pamela shook her head as she swiveled the computer screen so Noah could see the grainy black-and-white video of a group of men in SWAT gear approaching a box. Soon there was a bomb-bot poking the thing, and finally a new man in protective gear picked it up. "Harley is being stalked by someone her — Lucy McConnell

I love this world, even as I hear the great wind of leaving it rising, for there is a grainy taste I prefer to every idea of heaven: human friendship. — Rumi

Writing should be a little bit grainy, it should be a little bit raw. It should be every single thing flowing inside of us, and most of it isn't pretty. If there is nothing at stake in what I'm reading, if there is nothing at stake for the writer, I am just not interested. You gotta be there. You have to basically bleed for it. If not, why are you trying to put this in the world. — Gregory Sherl

Because brains packed with knowledge are yummy, that's why. They're nice and creamy. And sort of grainy at the same time. — Haruki Murakami

I don't believe truth is conveyed by style and presentation. I don't think that if it was grainy and full of handheld material, it would be any more truthful. — Errol Morris