Moment Lens Quotes & Sayings

The cab moves for a moment but then I see the blurry, glowing red lights through the downpour against my face and heavy lens of tears covering my eyes. The cab's brake lights. The car has stopped, as have I-and then I see the back door open.
It's my Jack Henry.
He gets out of the cab and stands in the heavy rain looking back at me. I don't know how-because my body has turned to mush-but I'm off my knees and running toward him.
... I touch his face because I can't believe he's real. You sort of have a beard. Almost. I love it. It's sexy. — Georgia Cates

Unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing. — Saul Bellow

As an inmate of a concentration camp, Corrie Ten Boom heard a commotion, and saw a short distance away a prison guard mercilessly beating a female prisoner. "What can we do for these people?" Corrie whispered. "Show them that love is greater," Betsie replied. In that moment, Corrie realized her sister's focus was on the prison guard, not the victim she was watching. Betsie saw the world through a different lens. She considered the actions of greatest moral gravity to be the ones we originate, not the ones we suffer. — Terryl L. Givens

My approach to photograph is kept simple, almost routine. All work, good and bad, is documented. I use standard film, a standard lens and no filters. Each work grows, strays, decays-integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expresses in the image. Process and decay are implicit. — Andy Goldsworthy

Amber was designed for life. She was designed for color and movement. She was not a girl born for the click of the camera's lens. No device could capture her, the way she was, the way she was meant to be. She was not born to be still or stationary. Without her color she was broken, a faulty image that could never be fixed. Without her voice she was nothing. Amber was gone. At that moment it was all clear to me. Everything to come was just a formality. — Matthew Crow

"I know perfectly well that at this moment the whole universe is listening to us," Jean Giraudoux wrote in The Madwoman of Chaillot, "and that every word we say echoes to the remotest star."That poetic paranoia is a perfect description of what the Sun, as a gravitational lens, could do for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. — Frank Drake

You see the suffering of children all the time nowadays. Wars and famines are played out before us in our living rooms, and almost every week there are pictures of children who have been through unimaginable loss and horror. Mostly they look very calm. You see them looking into the camera, directly at the lens, and knowing what they have been through you expect to see terror or grief in their eyes, yet so often there's no visible emotion at all. They look so blank it would be easy to imagine that they weren't feeling much.
And though I do not for a moment equate what I went through with the suffering of those children, I do remember feeling as they look. I remember Matt talking to me
others as well, but mostly Matt
and I remember the enormous effort required even to hear what he said. I was so swamped by unmanageable emotions that I couldn't feel a thing. It was like being at the bottom of the sea. — Mary Lawson

Eventually the girl would discover that sadists tended to be politer than regular Doms - at least, when not in a scene. After all, if a sadist was nasty, then how would he get anyone to play with him? — Cherise Sinclair

Surround yourself with good people. Whether they're the best or not, people are capable of learning if they've got good hearts and they're good souls. — Kid Rock

Turn to my left and see a young couple walking along the sidewalk. Seattle's Alki Beach is pretty much deserted, aside from a few die-hards, or early morning insomniacs, like me. The young couple are walking away from me, hand in hand, smiling at each other, and I point my lens at them and click. I zoom in on their sneaker-clad feet and locked hands and shoot some more, my photographer's eye appreciating their intimate moment on the beach. I inhale the salty air and stare out at the sound once again as a red-sailed boat gently glides out on the water. The early morning sunshine is — Kristen Proby

I see it all through the lens of my camera - the flurry of movement, the venue staff in black T-shirts, giving orders into their headsets. As I take it all in, my mind weighs the texture, the composition, the possibility of each changing scene, and I struggle to hold back, to keep my finger from pressing too soon. That's my biggest flaw as a photographer. I'm impatient - trigger-happy. I want the shot now, now, now, click, click, click, and if I could just wait a second more, the moment would really flourish. — Emery Lord

Put that thing down, girl. Don't you know it steals part of your soul, that little mechanical masterpiece you hold so frivolously? Don't you know it's not just mine it seals into its gears and trick mirrors, but yours, too. What you feel at this moment, what you hope for, what your dreams are, what you think your future will unfold like, it steals it all from you, too. You aren't safe just because of the side of the lens you're on. And later, when everything is said and done, and you want to forget everything that happened in these walls, when you're all alone, this picture, this piece of your soul you didn't even know was gone, will haunt you. It will come bearing knives and AKs and nine millimeters, and it will destroy you from the inside out. Put that damned thing down and stop acting like any of this is something worth remembering. — Shannon Noelle Long

We all have those dreams of going back in time and seeing what it was like when our parents were younger. Maybe we don't all have that dream. I don't know. Getting to role play or step back to a different moment in time and see things through a different lens is something that resonated with me, for sure. We don't get to do that, generally, but when the right neurological disorder lines up with the right unstable woman, that moment presents itself. Getting to know where we come from is a really profound way of getting to look at who we are. — Simon Helberg

Maybe the real issue here is that we were not created to do life by ourselves. We were not given a sentence of solitary confinement and placed in a world of isolation, but from the moment we entered this human experience, it was clear there was a world waiting to be discovered, creatures which were there for our interaction.

And the spark inside us often has to be spoken to, to be touched by the soul of another. It's as if the spark is only visible through the lens of night vision, a set of goggles which only another human being can hand to us. — Stephen Lovegrove

Never be bitter, become better. A testimony is pain that has been reassigned — Johnnie Dent Jr.

From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour. — Julia Margaret Cameron

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole. — E.B. White

Crazy isn't a condition it's a place and it exists somewhere between Love and Oblivion — Stanley Victor Paskavich

It is better to be priceless than to be cheap! — Bella Meraki

We live in a moment in which old conflicts, much altered during their subterraneous years, have boiled up again. The struggle to own the past so that it can be made to serve contemporary interests has led to gross distortions. But it is true also that the experience of any generation is inevitably a warped lens through which to view the thought and the actions of any previous generation, especially when there is a lack of rigorous historical perspective to correct for these distortions. This second consideration may go some way toward explaining the fact that there are not two sides to what would otherwise be a great national controversy. — Marilynne Robinson

When you're used to looking through a stills lens and you have to capture an emotional moment, and that picture is not moving and yet it has to have impact, I think that's the first influence on my style. — Gavid Hood

There are events you witness, or in which you participate, that forever remain sacrosanct and inviolate in memory, no matter how painful that memory is, because of the cost that you or others paid in order to be there in that moment when the camera lens clicked shut. — James Lee Burke

Remember, you and you alone are responsible for maintaining your energy. Give up blaming, complaining and excuse making, and keep taking action in the direction of your goals - however mundane or lofty they may be. — Jack Canfield

I don't write so much now. I'm getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia. — Charles Bukowski

I'm back there again, broken from being a champion,
The boy that no one loved,
The years I spent training like a method actor to
Become the man that everyone admired,
But it means nothing,
Like ashes on a forehead, they marked me inferior,
When I was still young enough to receive it into the grain of my being — Terrence Alonzo Craft

I beg your pardon. Sometimes, it's true I can be stubborn.'
'Sometimes?' she added derisively.
'Quite often,' he tempered. — S.N. Lemoing

I didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to people when they ask how it feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded? — Sherman Alexie

The air was soft, as it often was in this lovely month, and Eddie inhaled its sweetness. He found himself uplifted as he worked, caught up in something outside himself and his petty wants and needs. The clouds drifted like ice in a tumbler. Through his lens the river seemed made of light, there was the shimmer, and for a moment the world seemed whole to him. — Alice Hoffman

I have urged on woman independence of man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another, but because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage and prevented it her sex from being what it should be to itself or the other. I wish woman to live, first for God's sake. Then she will not take what is not fit for her from a sense of weakness and poverty. Then if she finds what she needs in man embodied, she will know how to love and be worthy of being loved. — Margaret Fuller

Power makes you lazy. — David Graeber

Just as warm sunlight can, by passing through a lens, turn to fire, so too can love. It's wrong to see it as something that swoops in from the outside. It's because it arises from the feelings we carry inside us that it strikes with such violence, at the moment we least expect. — Sabahattin Ali

There are different levels of fame. There are the polite fans who quietly and respectfully approach you and ask for an autograph - and that's acceptable. But the next level ... when you think you're having a moment of privacy and there's someone with a long lens catching you when you're about to eat, or sunbathe, or worse ... it's just so intrusive and I think it's part of the sickness of our culture. — Robert B. Weide

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. — Thomas Pynchon

No one knows where he who invented the plow was born, nor where he died; yet he has done more for humanity than the whole race of heroes who have drenched the earth with blood and whose deeds have been handed down with a precision proportionate only to the mischief they wrought. — Charles Caleb Colton