Images On Time Quotes & Sayings

I'd been surprised by the depth of emotion that was invested in that curiously archaic phrase 'great power'. What would it mean, I'd asked myself, to the lives of working journalists, salaried technocrats and so on if India achieved 'great power status'? What were the images evoked by this tag?
Now, walking through this echoing old palace, looking at the pictures in the corridors, this aspiration took on, for the first time, the contours of an imagined reality. This is what the nuclearists wanted: to sign treaties, to be pictured with the world's powerful, to hang portraits on their walls, to become ancestors. On the bomb they had pinned their hopes of bringing it all back. — Amitav Ghosh

I did not bring a television set out here with me, and I regret it sometimes when the evenings get long, but my idea was that living alone you can soon get stuck to those flickering images and to the chair you will sit on far into the night, and then time merely passes as you let others do the moving. — Per Petterson

If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights. — Bill Viola

I've been compiling a list of art project ideas for a long time. These are ideas of things I would love to see someday. They range from the practical - jackets with woodstoves in them - to the sublime - images of nuns on waterslides. — Misha Collins

The first time, I usually skim off the outer layer and end up with photographs that are fairly obvious. The second time, I have to look a little deeper. The images get more interesting. The third time it is even more challenging and on each subsequent occasion, the images should get stronger, but it takes more effort to get them. — Michael Kenna

To fill in the silence Tsukuru lowered the needle onto the record again, went back to the sofa, and settled in to listen to the music. This time he tried his best not to think of anything in particular. With his eyes closed and his mind a blank, he focused solely on the music. Finally, as if lured in by the melody, images flashed behind his eyelids, one after the next, appearing, then disappearing. A series of images without concrete form or meaning, rising up from the dark margins of consciousness, soundlessly crossing into the visible realm, only to be sucked back into the margins on the other side and vanish once again. Like the mysterious outline of microorganisms swimming across the circular field of vision of a microscope. — Haruki Murakami

In a gradually unsubtlizing progression, within a couple more sales-quarters most consumers were now using masks so undeniably better-looking on videophones than their real faces were in person, transmitting to one another such horrendously skewed and enhanced masked images of themselves, that enormous psychosocial stress began to result, large numbers of phone-users suddenly reluctant to leave home and interface personally with people who, they feared, were now habituated to seeing their far-better-looking masked selves on the phone and would on seeing them in person suffer (so went the callers' phobia) the same illusion-shattering aesthetic disappointment that, e.g., certain women who always wear makeup give people the first time they ever see them without makeup. — David Foster Wallace

I really like the interplay between thinking of text as ephemeral and thinking of it as a concrete, physical thing. With almost anything that I write, I'll stay completely immersed in the electronic text of it for a period of time and in another period, I'll stay immersed in it as a physical thing that can cut your skin. So with the apocalypses, I had them taped all over the wall and they had codes on them. Sometimes I would color code them in terms of thematic elements, sometimes in terms of voice, sometimes visual forms or images. — Lucy Corin

I hate it when you tell me shit like this after the plane has already taken off. Would it kill you to warn me ahead of time so I can tell you no freakn' way?" "And have you miss out on the adventure of a lifetime? Buddy, have you seen the images of the three girls we're supposed to rescue?" "Hot?" Joel queried, his blues eyes lighting with hope. "Very. And grateful. Don't forget very, very grateful when we rescue them from the wild men who took them." Lips — Eve Langlais

Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed. These are images that time changes and that change time, just as the sun and the rain play on the surface of things. — Jeanette Winterson

A diminished self-image causes us to slouch, to avoid looking others in the eye, to be unassertive, to be indecisive. On the other hand, a healthy self-image causes us to carry ourselves well, to speak confidently and to portray dignity. If we have not taken the time and thought to create a wonderful self-image for ourselves, we have had less, been less, and done less than was possible for us than if we had. We can improve our self-images at any moment including this one. — Wu Wei

We see images of people being beheaded on TV. That's not a thing that you see all the time. That's a different kind of scary. Unfortunately, some of the scary stuff is political, and that's a change from our past. — Denis O'Hare

Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish and only caters to or exploits people's weaknesses. Avoid being one of the mob who indulges in such pastimes. Your life is too short and you have important things to do. Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don't choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest. It is the easiest thing in the world to slide imperceptibly into vulgarity. But there's no need for that to happen if you determine not to waste your time and attention on mindless pap. — Epictetus

I don't know whether we think in moving images or whether we think in still images. I have a suspicion that on our hard drive, our series within our brains, [exist] still photographs of very important moments in our lives ... That we think in terms of still images and that what the photography is doing is making direct contact with the human hard drive and recording for all time a sense of what happened. — Jon Snow

It's a profoundly different thing to be able to refer to the images you are taking at the time and check them out on a laptop that is plugged into your Hasselblad and go "oh no, do it again, do it again" - all of those a requickly made decisions. The fact that you can see the images right away in a funny way makes the whole relationship more casual. I don't want a casual relationship with my subject. — Bill Henson

Getting on an airplane and arriving a few hours later in a completely different world with no time to take in individual images of the road - he didn't like that and it bothered him. — Pascal Mercier

The reason I was so at peace in that room, I think, is that in it I remembered back before time and beyond space to the day when God in his glory made us and the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. By quieting our minds and keeping still, by praying less in words perhaps than in images, maybe most of all by just letting up on ourselves and letting go, I think we can begin to put ourselves back in touch with that glory and joy we come from and begin moving out of the shadows toward something more like light. — Frederick Buechner

When it came time to build a tabernacle, the Israelite women brought all their mirrors to Moses so he could use them to make God's building more beautiful. (Exodus 38:8.) They were far more interested in enjoying God's glory than reflecting on their own images. — Gwendolyn Diaz

Before music videos first came out, you'd listen to a song with headphones on, sitting in a beanbag chair with your eyes closed, and you'd come up with your own visions, these things that came from within. Then all of a sudden, sometimes even the very first time you heard a song, it was with these visual images attached, and it robbed you of any form of self-expression. — Eddie Vedder

In their purest form myths, not unlike tragedy, are perhaps the most important moment in the troubled history of Mexican civilization. The cement of dreams, the architecture of language, made of images and rhythms which respond to and harmonize with each other through time and space, their wisdom is not of that which can be measured on the scale of the everyday. They are concurrently religion, ritual, belief, phantasmagoria, and the primary affirmation of a human coherence, the coagulating strength of language against the anguish of death and the certainty of nothingness. Myths express life, despite the promise of destruction, of the weight of the inevitable. They are without any doubt the most durable monuments of men, in America as in the ancient world. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with repeating images? Catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory. — Patti Smith

I am very proud of Zendaya for standing up for herself, her generation and her ancestors. Her response was classy. Locs are a lifestyle for some and for others an artistic fashion statement..In either case, the images express power, natural beauty, and a boldness that always stands out. It is when you truly spend time with a person that you know who they really are on the inside, and not by what you see on the outside. — Ledisi

I started Shutterstock out of my own need. I'd previously created a few software companies, and each time, I struggled to find affordable images to use on my websites. — Jon Oringer

Espinoza experienced something similar, though slightly different in two respects. First, the need to be near Liz Norton struck some time before he got back to his apartment in Madrid. By the time he was on the plane he'd realized that she was the perfect woman, the one he'd always hoped to find, and he began to suffer. Second, among the ideal images of Norton that passed at supersonic speed through his head as the plane flew toward Spain at four hundred miles an hour, there were more sex scenes than Pelletier had imagined. Not many more, but more. (16) — Roberto Bolano

I've listened to music all my life. I've always felt that music tells more stories sometimes than films, with more possibilities. Every time you listen to them, songs bring different images and moods - depending on where you are in your life, you can listen to a song, and it means something different. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Dreaming her way backward in time, resurrecting images, the young girl realized, with wonder, that the absent are always present, that you don't make them go away simply because you get on a train and head off in a particular direction. — Carol Shields

She opens the book. Each sheet has one or two antique photographs stuck with corner tabs. The images are neither black and white nor gray, but hold that brownish gold of time and exposure to air.

"This man is your great grandfather. Look at that face, Pedro. It is a mean mean face." He's standing in front of a wood pile, holding an axe. "I think he was only a teenager there, a long time before he met my mother. But look how handsome he was. And how mean."

It's funny the way she smiles when she talks about him. Saying he's mean has a perverse joy for her, as if she can stick her tongue out at him and his hands are tied so he can't slap her for doing it. She's right, though. There's no lingering smile, no potential for mirth in the burlap of his skin. I notice snow on the ground at his feet, but he's wearing a thin, unbuttoned shirt, showing no sign of cold. — Laurie Perez

It's just like intuition. Intuition speaks to each of us in whatever way we can hear it: Through songs on the radio or images that flash in our minds. Someone says exactly the right thing at the right time. Answers to prayers make instant sense or they come in clues we have to decipher, just like in a scavenger hunt. — Jan Henrikson

Since the beginning of time, people have been trying to change the world so that they can be happy. This hasn't ever worked, because it approaches the problem backward. What The Work gives us is a way to change the projector - mind - rather than the projected. It's like when there's a piece of lint on a projector's lens. We think there's a flaw on the screen, and we try to change this person and that person, whomever the flaw appears on next. But it's futile to try to change the projected images. Once we realize where the lint is, we can clear the lens itself. This is the end of suffering, and the beginning of a little joy in paradise. — Byron Katie

To take a screenshot of the content currently displayed on your Kindle Paperwhite, tap the upper right and lower left corners of the screen at the same time, and immediately release. The screen will flash to indicate that the screenshot was taken, and the image will be stored in the base folder of the Kindle. You can retrieve and view the images on your computer when you connect your Kindle to your computer via a USB cable. — Bohner, Carl

All comparison is based on memory, and memory is an image based on engrams. It follows that all judgement, evaluation, is an interpretation of images, for even the present is already a memory by the time we have seized it.
Therefore the unending process of finding things "good" or "not so good" is a work of imagination. Would in not be futile indeed to suppose that such judgments, that is any and all judgments, could have any absolute existence or value? — Wei Wu Wei

He wasn't normally conscious of it, but there was one part of his body that was extremely sensitive, somewhere along his back. This soft, subtle spot he couldn't reach was usually covered by something, so that it was invisible to the naked eye. But when, for whatever reason, that spot became exposed and someone's finger pressed down on it, something inside him would stir. A special substance would be secreted, swiftly carried by his bloodstream to every corner of his body. That special stimulus was both a physical sensation and a mental one, creating vivid images in his mind. The first time he met Sara, he felt an anonymous finger reach out and push down forcefully on that trigger on his back. — Haruki Murakami

I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space and allowing me to travel with Captain Nemo twenty thousand leagues under the sea, fight with d'Artagnan, Athos, Portos, and Aramis against the intrigues threatening the Queen in the days of the secretive Richelieu, or stumble through the sewers of Paris, transformed into Jean Valjean carrying Marius's inert body on my back. — Mario Vargas-Llosa

He wonders if words aren't an essential element of sex, if talking isn't finally a more subtle form of touching, and if the images dancing in our heads aren't just as important as the bodies we hold in our arms. Margot tells him that sex is the one thing in life that counts for her, that if she couldn't have sex she would probably kill herself to escape the boredom and monotony of being trapped inside her own skin. Walker doesn't say anything, but as he comes into her for the second time, he realizes that he shares her opinion. He is mad for sex. Even in the grip of the most crushing despair, he is mad for sex. Sex is the lord and the redeemer, the only salvation on earth. — Paul Auster

For time not only moves inexorable forward, as the underlying grid to our personal chronicle, but is manipulated by our psychic needs and natures into various images of timelessness and timeliness. Transient moments suddenly expand, visions of infinity intervene, notes and phrases become outlets of fantasy, escape, recollection, or omen. The music travels on two planes, chronological time and psychological time. Both planes are essential and must be abundantly represented. — Russell Sherman

On the last album, I didn't want to disturb the melody with too many stories. This time, I wanted to know if I was able to create images with words, with the sound of words.( ... ) I think that's a good thing when the one who is listening, is feeling it in a different way that the one who creates. We are all listening with different perspectives.( ... ) I don't want to impose my subjectivity to the listener. — Agnes Obel

The images are visual, auditory, olfactory, kinesthetic. They aren't laid down on the same tracks as thought. And sometimes, when they return to you, it is as if you feel them for the very first time. Memory lives on in the details, like the color of a room, a tone of a voice, the touch of a child, the smell of a man. — Martha Manning

At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper.

At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts.

The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional. — Ken Liu

Without the Dreamscape, we can't sleep.
My parents remind me all the time about stories their parents told them, of how things were in the Manic Age. The time before our bodies were upgraded to sync with the amazing invention called the Dreamscape. Thirty-eight years ago, people actually had to fall asleep on their own and, sometimes, they would toss and turn for hours. My grandparents said when sleep, in its mercy, did come, it often brought with it horrible images I've heard people used to call nightmares. — Shannon Duffy

There are many different techniques and forms of meditation. The common element among these techniques is that the person takes time out from the daily pace of life to close their eyes and reflect on thoughts or images that create internal feelings of peace and relaxation. — Tim McCarthy

The media-contamination hypothesis usually focuses on the book Michelle Remembers (Smith and Pazder, 1980) and the movie Rosemary's Baby;. These images were in the popular culture for centuries before survivor memories started to surface in therapy; therefore, the media-contamination hypothesis fails to account for the time lag and cannot provide a full account of the phenomenona. — Colin A. Ross

Once the vision of the fulfillment of your dream has been planted in your mind, bring it in to your prayer life. Each time you pray the picture to mind and meditate on it. Pray over it. See it happening. Destroy all the images of failure. Replace them with the image of success. — Phil Pringle

Generally speaking, our minds impose an entirely artificial order on the world. It is the only way that such an inadequate instrument as our brain can function. It cannot deal with the complexity of reality, so simplifies everything until it can, putting events into an artificial order so they can be dealt with one at a time, rather than all at once as they should be. Such a way of interpreting existence is learnt, rather in the way that our brain has to turn the images which hit our retinas upside down in order to make sense of them. Children — Iain Pears

Images flicker through my mind of sitting here months ago with this achingly handsome man, wondering what in the hell he saw in me. And I get it now. He saw the pieces of me that could make a whole. Accepted the jagged edges that needed to be healed, because he too had the same thing. And here we sit again, in parts and pieces, needing to be put back together.
But this time we have each other to lean on, to look to for help. — K. Bromberg

I do not wish to die- There is such contingent beauty in life: The open window on summer mornings Looking out on gardens and green things growing, The shadowy cups of roses flowering to themselves- Images of time and eternity- Silence in the garden and felt along the walls. — A. L. Rowse

Nowadays myths can be practically momentary: transmitted throughout the world by 24-hour news and the internet, they spread virally, entering the minds of tens and hundreds of millions of people in minutes or hours. Are these true myths, or mass-manufactured fantasies? At times they can be both. In recent years images of resistance to tyranny have been relayed around the world by mass media, many of them captured on mobile phones by the resisters themselves. The myths of revolution that moved the resisters were reinforced, for a time, by the media that make the news. But myths survive for only as long as they are enacted by those who accept them. As popular uprisings go through their normal sequence of rebellion, anarchy and renewed — John N. Gray

It's amazing to me that not only can we put a probe around Saturn and get images of its moons, but our math and physics are so freaking accurate we can say, "Hey, you know what? On this date at this time if we turn Cassini that way we'll see a moon over 2 million kilometers away pass in front of another one nearly 3 million kilometers away."Every morning, I have a 50/50 chance of finding my keys. That kinda puts things in perspective. — Phil Plait

Lord Daldace looked about as if seeing the villa for the first time. "What are dreams? Ordinary experience is a dream. The eyes, the ears, the nose: they present pictures on the brain, and these pictures are called 'reality'. At night, when we dream, other pictures, of source unknown, are impinged. Sometimes the dream-images are more real than 'reality'. Which is solid, which illusion? Why trouble to make the distinction? — Jack Vance

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe! — Laurie Halse Anderson

Although signs may be found in everything that comes to us, as though a river at our doorstep carried these messages on its surface, the Quran (like other sacred books) speaks in terms of empirical experience, since it is intended to endure through the ages and cannot bind itself to the 'scientific' theories of any particular time. Its images are the phenomena of nature as they appear to us in our experience - the rising and setting of the sun, the domed sky above and the mountains, which are like weights set upon the earth. Scientific observations change according to the preconceptions of the observer and the instruments at his disposal, and the speculations which blinkered human minds construct on the basis of these observations change no less swiftly. But man's experience of the visual universe does not change. The sun 'rises' for me today as it 'rose' for the man of ten thousand years ago. — Charles Le Gai Eaton

This, too, was like seeing double. This was where my heartaches began.

In combat zones there is no structure, the form of things changes all the time. Safety, danger, control, panic, these and other labels constantly attach and detach themselves from places and people. When you emerge from such a space it stays with you, its otherness randomly imposes itself on the apparent stability of your peaceful home-town streets. What-if becomes the truth, you imagine buildings exploding in Gramercy Park, you see craters appear in the middle of Washington Square, and women carrying shopping bags drop dead on Delancey Street, bee-stung by sniper fire. You take pictures of your small patch of Manhattan and ghost images begin to appear in them, negative phantoms of the distant dead. Double exposure: like Kirlian photography, it becomes a new kind of truth. — Salman Rushdie

Unfortunately our children today seem to spend less and less time with their overworked parents, and so they draw more information about the world from the images on movie and TV screens. The true power of the media is the ability to redefine reality, to alter our expectations about what constitutes normal life. TV and the movies have abused that power by advancing the notion that wholesome, ordinary happiness is impossible. — Michael Medved

The song succeeds or fails just based on whether you argue your point successfully. I like throwing images together, which create meaning if you listen to it one time, but if you listen to it another time you might get a different meaning. — Iron & Wine

The struggle for power had reached a new stage; it was fought with scientific formulas. The weapons vanished in the abyss like fleeting images, like pictures one throws into the fire ...
When new models were displayed to the masses at the great parades on Red Square in Moscow or elsewhere, the crowds stood in reverent silence and then broke into jubilant shouts of triumph ...
Though the display was continual, in this silence and these shouts something evil, old as time, manifested itself in man, who is an outsmarter and setter of traps. Invisible, Cain and Tubalcain marched past in the parade of phantoms. — Ernst Junger

She had been amazed-and a little relieved-to discover that she was not concealing some private neurosis; almost all imaginative people heard voices. Not just thoughts but actual voices inside their heads, different personae, each as clearly defined as the voices on an old-time radio show. They came from the right side of the brain, the teacher explained-the side which is most commonly associated with visions of telepathy and that striking human ability to create images by drawing comparisons and making metaphors.
There are no such things as flying saucers. — Stephen King

Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only - if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things - beautiful things - that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? Because, I mean - mending old things, preserving them, looking after them - on some level there's no rational grounds for it - ... fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn't be an object. It'd be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.
- Hobie, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt — Donna Tartt

For a long time, she sat and saw.
She had seen her brother die with one eye open, on still in a dream. She had said goodbye to her mother and imagined her lonely wait for a train back home to oblivion. A woman of wire had laid herself down, her scream traveling the street, till it fell sideways like a rolling coin starved of momentum. A young man was hung by a rope made of Stalingrad snow. She had watched a bomber pilot die in a metal case. She had seen a Jewish man who had twice given her the most beautiful pages of her life marched to a concentration camp. And at the center of all of it, she saw the Fuhrer shouting his words and passing them around.
Those images were the world, and it stewed in her as she sat with the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brims of their bellies with paragraphs and words. — Markus Zusak

Gray mattresses with red and blue stripes in something that looks like a hallway or an overly long waiting room. In any case, his memory is frozen in immediate past like a faceless man in a dentist's chair. There are houses and streets that run down to the sea, dirty windows and shadows on staircase landings. We hear someone say "a long time ago it was noon," the light bounces off the center of immediate past, something that's neither a screen nor attempts to offer images. Memory slowly dictates soundless sentences. We imagine that all of this has been done to avoid confusion, a layer of white paint covers the film on the floor. Fleeing together long ago became living together and thus the integrity of the gesture was lost; the shine of immediate past. — Roberto Bolano

Love at first sight is a hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned, "paralysed" as Menon was by Socrates, the model of loved objects, of captivating images, or again converted by an apparition, nothing distinguishing the path of enamoration from the Road to Damascus; subsequently ensnared, held fast, immobilised, nose stuck to the image (the mirror). In that moment when the other's image comes to ravish me for the first time, I am nothing more than the Jesuit Athanasius Kirchner's wonderful Hen: feet tied, the hen went to sleep with her eyes fixed on the chalk line, which was traced not far from her beak; when she was untied, she remained motionless, fascinated, "submitting to her vanquisher," as the Jesuit says (1646); yet, to waken her from her enchantment, to break off the violence of her Image-repertoire (vehemens animalis imaginatio), it was enough to tap her on the wing; she shook herself and began pecking in the dust again. — Roland Barthes

On a more technical level, a story takes a lot of words. And to generate words and phrases and images and so on, that will compel the reader to continue reading - that stand a chance of really grabbing a reader - the writer has to work out of a place of, let's say, familiarity and affection. The matrix of the story has to be made out of stuff the writer really knows about and likes. The writer can't be stretching and (purely) inventing all the time. Well, I can't, anyway. — George Saunders

Find your bed, Martise. I'll be up for some time. This is bandit country, and we'll each take a watch. Put your blankets with mine. We'll stay warmer that way. And keep your shoes on. I'll join you soon." She'd grown used to him curled against her in sleep. Even the light snores purred into her ear comforted her, and there was always the possibility that when he awakened, he'd want her beneath him. Or atop him. Martise blushed at the sensual images playing in her mind. She prepared their bed as he instructed, crawled under the blankets - with her shoes on - and fell asleep. She woke when Silhara slid beneath the blankets and spooned against her. He laid his arm across her waist and wedged his leg between hers through her heavy skirts. His sigh tickled her ear. "Far better if you were bare, but this will do. — Grace Draven

This, she thought, isn't just for today. It's for everything. For the heartache that still felt like a punch in the gut each time it struck, fresh as new, at unpredictable moments; for the smiling lies and the mental images she couldn't shake; for the shame of having been so naive.
For the way loneliness is worse when you return to it after a reprieve - like the soul's version of putting on a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable.
And this, Karou thought, no longer smiling, is for the irretrievable. — Laini Taylor

Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are tools for the art of living. They are pieces of intelligence about human behavior that neuroscience is now exploring with new words and images: what we practice, we become. What's true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I've come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space. There are superstar virtues that come most readily to mind and can be the work of a day or a lifetime - love, compassion, forgiveness. And there are gentle shifts of mind and habit that make those possible, working patiently through the raw materials of our lives. — Krista Tippett

In practice it undermines the transformation of faith. When Christians concentrate their time and energy on their own separate spheres and their own institutions-whether all-absorbing megachurches, Christian yellow-page businesses, or womb-to-tomb Christian cultural ghettoes-they lose the outward thrusting, transforming power that is at the heart of the gospel. Instead of being 'salt' and 'light' -images of a permeating and penetrating action-Christians and Christian institutions become soft and vulnerable to corruption from within. — Os Guinness

We are not 'censored' in the traditional way in the United States: writers are not beaten or killed because of their words, and no Ministry of Truth enforces an official version of what can be printed and thought. But in this culture of images, we are censoring ourselves. That may be more insidious and long-lasting. What I mean is that we disparage long-term complexity, and extol superficiality. We ignore reading, and lavish time on images. To read, in my mind, is to consider and to think. To see an image is to react. What happens when we start believing the world and what is important in it are only these reactions and prejudices? What have you become when the most expected of you is simply to press a 'Like' button? What kind of gulag is it when its inhabitants are too stupid to understand they are its prisoners? — Sergio Troncoso

The pieces of the puzzle are visible, but not the grand design. Images flicker and dance like memories, hinting at events to come. They scatter the moment I reach for them only to re-form to taunt me. I who never truly possessed them, nor may I ever.
They do tell me this: a time of great change approaches and it's not enough to watch. We must act. We can't count on others to do our work for us or all may be lost.
- Oracle Lilian's Diary, Winter of 3765 — Mara Amberly

When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It's like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now; when was then? — Bill Nye

At night it was a different matter. The whole night was his, the night when his cough and his insomnia never failed to start on time, along with the random disconnected images that crossed his mind. No one can stop the machine of memory from working. Nothing has been invented, as far as he knows, that can tame memory, make it work on demand. Even I, with my few exaggerated memories, cannot fend off attacks by the most unpleasant of them. — Amjad Nasser

PhotoShop is a program I use all the time with my 2D stuff. And that's an extraordinary program - you really can do anything there, and I've never hit my head on the ceiling. The 3D stuff is incredibly complicated, monstrously complicated, but for the things that I want to do, I've found very simple and interesting ways, I hope, of making images without getting tied up too much in the maps and technicalities. — Dave McKean

And suddenly, lying in bed, I became aware of every inch of my body and I apologised to it, quietly. I apologised for bring so ungrateful for so long. Then I thanked my arms, hands and fingers for always trying so hard. I thanked my legs and feet for holding me up all the time. I thanked my brain for working so amazingly well and conjuring up thoughts and dreams and sentences and images and crazy poems. And I thanked all my organs for working together and giving me life. It had taken four and a half billion years for me to be here. Right now. In this universe. And in that moment, I felt totally overwhelmed at being alive. There could be nothing but there was everything. I didn't want to waste a single second more worrying about trivialities. Worrying that I'd never match up to an ideal that didn't even exist. Nobody is normal. We are all different. I had to make sure that every moment I had left on this planet counted. — Francesca Martinez