My Old Picture Quotes & Sayings

One day, I went to a soba restaurant outside town, and while I was waiting for the zarusoba I opened an old graph magazine. There was a picture of an exhausted, lonely kneeling woman who wore a checked patterned yukata after the tradegy of a large earthquake. With the intensity of my chest ready to burn up, I fell in love with that poor woman. I also felt a horrifying desire for her. Maybe tragedy and desire are back to back to one another. — Osamu Dazai

As the prospect gradually revealed itself and disclosed the scene over which the wind had wandered in the dark, like my memory over my life, I had a pleasure in discovering the unknown objects that had been around me in my sleep. At first they were faintly discernible in the mist, and above them the later stars still glimmered. That pale interval over, the picture began to enlarge and fill up so fast that at every new peep I could have found enough to look at for an hour. Imperceptibly my candles became the only incongruous part of the morning, the dark places in my room all melted away, and the day shone bright upon a cheerful landscape, prominent in which the old Abbey Church, with its massive tower, threw a softer train of shadow on the view than seemed compatible with its rugged character. — Charles Dickens

Not all babies are cute when they're born no matter how many new parents try to convince you otherwise. This is yet another lie the half-baked "theys" lead you to believe. Some babies are born looking like old men with wrinkled faces, age spots, and a receding hairline. When I was born, my father George took my hospital picture over to his friend Tim's house while my mom was still recuperating in the hospital. Tim took one look at my picture and said, "Oh sweet Jesus, George. You better hope she's smart." It was no different with my son, Gavin. He was funny looking. I was his mother, so I could say that. He had a huge head, no hair, and his ears stuck out so far I often wondered if they worked like the Whisper 2000, and he was able to pick up conversations from a block away. — Tara Sivec

I got the idea from our family's plant book. The place where we recorded things you cannot trust to memory. The page begin's with the person's picture. A photo if we can find it. If not, a sketch or a painting by Peeta. Then, in my most careful handwriting, come all the details it would be a crime to forget. Lady licking Prim's cheek. My father's laugh. Peeta's father with the cookies. The colour of Finnick's eyes. What Cinna would do with a length of silk. Boggs reprogramming the Holo. Rue poised on her toes, arms slightly extended, like bird about to take flight. On and on. We seal the pages with salt water and promises to live well to make their deaths count. Haymitch finally joins us, contributing twenty-three years of tributes he was forced to mentor. Additions become smaller. An old memory that surfaces. A late promise preserved between the pages. Strange bits of happiness, like the photo of Finnick and Annie's newborn son. — Suzanne Collins

My first memories are from when I was very little, maybe three or four years old playing in my neighbourhood at home. I can picture myself with the ball at my feet from a very young age. — Lionel Messi

I suppose everybody has a mental picture of the days of the week, some seeing them as a circle, some as an endless line, and others again, for all I know, as triangles and cubes. Mine is a wavy line proceeding to infinity, dipping to Wednesday which is the colour of old silver dark with polishing and rising again to a pale gold Sunday. This day has a feeling in my picture of warmth and light breezes and sunshine and afternoons that stretch to infinity and mornings full of far-off bells. — Angela Thirkell

Glad you like my first tableau. Come and see number two. Hope it isn't spoilt; it was very pretty just now. This is 'Othello telling his adventures to Desdemona'."
The second window framed a very picturesque group of three. Mr March in an armchair, with Bess on a cushion at his feed, was listening to Dan, who, leaning against a pillow, was talking with unusual animation. The old man was in shadow, but little Desdemona was looking up with the moonlight full upon her face, quite absorbed in the story he was telling so well. The gay drapery over Dan's shoulder, his dark colouring and the gesture of his arm made the picture very striking and both very striking, and both spectators enjoyed it with silent pleasure, till Mrs Jo said in a quick whisper:
"I'm glad he's going away. He's too picturesque to have among so many romantic girls. Afraid his 'grand, gloomy and peculiar' style will be too much for our simple maids. — Louisa May Alcott

I didn't take it seriously myself at the time, but now all of my old teachers are supportive. Even my principal - I sold out the O2 Arena in London, and he came out to see me, which was really cool. I actually put a picture with him on my Instagram, and I think and he's wearing one of my snapbacks. — Tinie Tempah

MEET MR. HIV," writes an 11-year-old child, over a diamond-shaped face from which six scaly legs extend. "He invades your body. This is what he looks like when he does," another child writes over a scary-looking monster that resembles a tarantula. An HIV-infected 12-year-old draws a transparent yellow picture of his body filled with hairy, bloblike creatures that resemble paramecia and amoebae. "I hate you because you do bad things to my body," writes another boy. "Go pick on someone your own size. — Jonathan Kozol

If only the picture could grow old, and I stay young. For that ... for that, I would give my SOUL for that. — Oscar Wilde

But I can tell you the reason for me being so youthful-looking for a man a century and a half old. I'm not exactly what you'd call human. Hell, I'm not human at all. The closest thing you might be able to relate me to is what's known as a 'werewolf', but not the kind you see in picture shows that sprout hair and teeth every time there's a full moon. The truth of my kind is a lot more complicated - and frightening - than that. — Nancy A. Collins

Sometimes you don't know if your memory is because you really experienced it or because you look at your old pictures. I have a nice picture of myself held up by my grandfather and my father standing next to me. We all have the same name - we're all called Anton Corbijn. That's something I cherish. — Anton Corbijn

Kaushik, what about a picture?" my father suggested. I shook my head. I had left my camera, my father's old Yashica, at school. "But you always have it with you." That look of irritated disappointment, the one that had appeared the day my mother died and was missing now that he'd married Chitra, passed briefly across my father's face. "I forgot it," I said. It was true, I did always have the camera with me. Even on quiet weekends when I came home and my father and I saw no one I would bring it, taking it with me on walks. This time I had left it behind, knowing that I would not want to document anything. "I don't understand," my father said. "Neither do I," I replied. "You haven't wanted a picture of anything in years." "That's not true." "It is." We were stating facts and at the same time arguing, an argument whose depths only he and I could fully comprehend. — Jhumpa Lahiri

I was so sure I'd heard the doorbell and simultaneously certain that I hadn't. How could a smart and competent 23-year-old not be able to distinguish the edges of dreams from the tips of reality? How had the picture gone so horribly blurry that I'd looked to a dog to regain my bearings? — Julie Flygare

Some guys have a thing for cheerleaders," he says, his voice easy. I roll my eyes as I start tossing socks into the bag.
"Let me guess. You want to know if I still have my old uniform." He sets the picture back on the nightstand and moves toward the door. "Nah. Not my thing. But I think I could develop a thing for girls in combat boots." I spin around in surprise, wanting to see his face, wanting to know if he means what I think he means. But he's already gone. — Lauren Layne

But against sandfly fever one could be inoculated, and I have another, hideously vivid picture of a great menacing brute of a doctor sticking a Thing that ended in a vicious needle into my mother's arm. Mad to defend my own, I scrambled off my father's knee, and flew to her rescue. I fixed my teeth in the doctor's horrible hairy wrist and hung on like a terrier, until my father succeeded in prising me away. Afterwards, everybody said how wonderful the doctor had been, because he continued calmly giving the inoculation while I was prised off him, instead of breaking the needle in my mother's arm. But nobody said how brave it was of me, only three years old, when all is said and done, and gone in the legs at that, to take on such fearful odds for the sake of love. — Rosemary Sutcliff

In my light-headedness and fatigue, which made me feel drastically cut off from myself and as if I were observing it all at a remove, I walked past candy shops and coffee shops and shops with antique toys and Delft tiles from the 1800s, old mirrors and silver glinting in the rich, cognac-colored light, inlaid French cabinets and tables in the French court style with garlanded carvings and veneerwork that would have made Hobie gasp with admiration - in fact the entire foggy, friendly, cultivated city with its florists and bakeries and antiekhandels reminded me of Hobie, not just for its antique-crowded richness but because there was a Hobie-like wholesomeness to the place, like a children's picture book where aproned tradespeople swept the floors and tabby cats napped in sunny windows. But there was much too much to see, and — Donna Tartt

A good sense of humour combined with
self-distance always make the world a better place. And my hundred-year-old, Allan Karlsson, would probably add a bottle of vodka to complete the picture. — Jonas Jonasson

Everything in New York is a photograph. All the things that are supposed to be dirty or rough or unrefined are the most beautiful things. Garbage cans at the ends of alleyways look like they've been up all night talking with each other. Doorways with peeling paint look like the wise lines around an old feller's eyes. I stop and stare but can't stay because men always think I'm selling something. Or worse, giving something away. I wish I could be invisible. Or at least I wish I didn't look like someone they want to look at. They stop being part of the picture, they get up from their chess game and come out of the frame at me, blocking my view. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

In my opinion, the best time to be alive is always right now. People are aways whining about how they were born in the wrong century, but they really haven't thought things through. They picture the old castle they wish they could live in, but they don't think about the drafts in the winter or the pitch darkness at night, or all the spiders and the lice. They can't imagine the everyday pain of a life without movies or recorded music or... or... Interet videos about cats. And don't even get me started on women who idealize the past. Do you have any idea what it was like to be a woman even a hundred years ago? Horrible! And a hundred years before that, the situation practically defies description. We might as well have been slaves. Trussed up in hoop skirts and corsets, married off like racehorses. Good riddance to history, I say! — Tommy Wallach

The most difficult part of playing Christ was that I had to keep up the image around the clock. As soon as the picture finished, I returned home to Sweden and tried to find my old self. It took six months to get back to normal. — Max Von Sydow

I brought a picture with me that I had at home, of a girl in a swing with a castle and pretty blue bubbles in the background, to hang in my room, but that nurse here said the girl was naked from the waist up and not appropriate. You know, I've had that picture for fifty years and I never knew she was naked. If you ask me, I don't think the old men they've got here can see well enough to notice that she's bare-breasted. But, this is a Methodist home, so she's in the closet with my gallstones. — Fannie Flagg

I made a picture called Super Mario Bros., and my six-year-old son at the time - he's now 18 - he said, 'Dad I think you're probably a pretty good actor, but why did you play that terrible guy King Koopa in Super Mario Bros?' And I said, 'Well Henry, I did that so you could have shoes,' and he said, 'Dad, I don't need shoes that badly.' — Dennis Hopper

The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, 'The Magic Monkey' - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister. — Nick Flynn

When I turned 15 years old, I decided to press the issue a little further. I knew fuckin well that my daddy wasn't dead, because never in my life growing up did I ever see my mother crying for this man. I never saw her in mourning or anything. I never saw a picture of him hanging up around the house. — Diamond Johnson

How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June ... . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that - for that - I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that! — Oscar Wilde

Oh, do you, Milo? You're so selfish. You don't see the bigger picture." "What's the bigger picture?" "You're still here looking for handouts. Who's going to take care of me?" "I'm on my knees here, Mom. Not for me, for my family. For my wife. For a beautiful grandson you have totally ignored." "He's kind of a brat. I'll be in his life when he gets a little impulse control." "He's not even four." "I have needs. I'm tired of this child-worshipping culture. You're just a slave to it, Milo." "I'm only trying to be a decent dad." "Don't waste your time. It's not in your genes. Besides, try making some money. That might be a good dad move. For heaven's sake, the system's rigged for white men and you still can't tap in." "You're right, Mom. What can I say? But still, it would mean a lot to me if you made a little more of an effort with Bernie." "Bernie schmernie. This is my decade." "Okay, you wrinkled old spidercunt, have it your way. — Sam Lipsyte

Ray Harryhausen's 'Sinbad' picture was the first film I remember seeing. I was two years old when it came out, and it changed my life forever. I had nightmares about dragons and stuff for years - and loved it! — Warren Spector

I don't remember the first picture I took, but I actually found a picture of myself on a trip back to my old family home in Malaysia. I'm five years old, sitting on the floor with the family camera in my hand. It was a film camera - not a DSLR - with a fixed lens and a nice manual zoom. — Ren Ng

I was standing on the deck looking down at a gang of stevedores working on the dock thirty feet below. One of them recognized me, nudged his neighbor, and pointed. All at once the whole gang stopped working to yell, 'Booster! Booster Keaton!' They waved in wild excitement, and I waved back, marveling, because it was fifteen years of more since they could have seen my last M-G-M picture.
And if there is sweeter music this side of heaven I haven't heard it. Dr. Avedon said I could live to be a hundred years old. I intend to do it. For who would not wish to live a hundred years in a world where there are so many people who remember with gratitude and affection a little man with a frozen face who made them laugh a bit long years ago when they and I were both young? — Buster Keaton

The whole movie thing has never been a source of great pride for me, in that Burt Reynolds, who starred in the picture, butchered the original script I had written for the late Steve McQueen, and the result, while a massive moneymaker, was lashed by the critics. But like the old joke about Pierre the Bridge Builder, The Cannonball Run is indelibly inscribed on my so-called career portfolio, and few conversations with strangers pass without the subject of the picture arising. — Brock Yates

Looking at a human being or even a picture of a human being is different from looking at an object. Newborn babies, only hours old, copy the expressions of adults. They pucker up, try to grin, look surprised, and stick out their tongues. The photographs of imitating infants are both funny and touching. They do not know they are doing it; this response is in them from the beginning. Later, people learn to suppress the imitation mechanism; it would not be good if we went on forever copying every facial expression we saw. Nevertheless, we human beings love to look at faces because we find ourselves there. When you smile at me, I feel a smile form on my own face before I am aware it is happening, and I smile because I am seeing me in your eyes and know that you like what you see. — Siri Hustvedt

[My mom] is quite the strict editor. I feel like maybe she has more of the old-school editing style, which really works in picture books, because you don't want to articulate anything in words that is already shown through the pictures. — Jenna Bush

I'll never make another Hardy picture ... I'm fed up with these dopey, insipid parts. How long can a guy play a jerk kid? I'm 27 years old. I've been divorced once and separated from my second wife. I have two boys of my own. I spent almost two years in the army. It's time Judge Hardy went out and bought me a double-breasted suit. — Mickey Rooney

I thought about my Willa, about her blind-smiling at me from the hospital bed where she laid and where she died a few hours later, thought about the girl my Willa was in the picture she'd shown me, smiling out from inside the old lady Willa on the night she died. I thought about that wild Willa picture, and about the certain order she'd pulled that picture and others out of her hatbox to share with me on the summer nights when we were doing our secret sharing.

And I thought about people saving certain pictures for a reason, saving and discarding according to the self-told story of themselves, how mainly it had nothing to do with who they were in the everyday, but instead, who they were in their special caught moments. How they held onto those pictures, and they held. — Robin Martin

What in the seven levels of hell did my son see in this place?" Horace asks.
We're standing on the street on Thursday morning, staring up at the house, after taking inventory of the place. From here, I can see five different spots where the brick needs to be repaired and pick out where shingles are missing on the sloped roof. The porch sags, and the windows are dingy. But if I let my eyes go out of focus and ignore all that, I can kinda picture what the place might look like after a little - never mind - a lot of TLC.
"It has good bones?" I suggest.
"It's got old bones," he mutters.
I smirk. "Yeah? So do you. Doesn't mean they're all bad."
He smacks my arm, but he's grinning. "Just wait till you get to be my age, and then tell me how good old bones are. — Erica Cameron

I dream in tunnel vision, I think. I remember in tunnel vision, I think. The question remains, when my tunnel vision goes, as it will very soon, what will I remember seeing? How will I remember?
All I can do is write it down and keep writing. How else can I hold this picture, this life, or this face together? The view from here is of a boy with a softball, ready to let it go. His is an ironic gift from the past, as if the young me is aiming at the old, saying, "Here, buddy, let me help you with that." I wanted to let the ball fly at my lens, whatever was left of it. — Ryan Knighton

Every day new souls kept springing up [within me] beside the host of old ones, making clamorous demands and creating confusion; and now I saw as clearly as in a picture what an illusion my former personality had been. The few capacities and pursuits in which I happened to be strong had occupied all my attention, and I had painted a picture of myself as a person who was in fact nothing more than a most refined and educated specialist in poetry, music and philosophy; and as such I had lived, leaving all the rest of me to be a chaos of potentialities, instincts and impulses which I found an encumbrance and gave the label of Steppenwolf. — Hermann Hesse

O! I must tell you that I have fallen in love with a gentleman whom I have lately come acquainted with: he is about 60 or 70 - has ... O! I must tell you that I have fallen in love with a gentleman whom I have lately come acquainted with: he is about 60 or 70 - has the misfortune to be humpbacked, crooked legged, and rather deformed in his face. - But, in sober sadness, I am delighted with the Dean of Coleraine, whose picture this is, and which I have very lately read. The piety, the zeal, the humanity, goodness and humility of this charming old man have won my heart. Ah! who will not envy him the invaluable treasure! — Fanny Burney

I looked around for that welcoming light I'd heard about, but I didn't see it. Instead, everything around me seemed to glow and shimmer in the sunlight. I heard beautiful sounds-not the voices of dead loved ones, but the laughter and singing of my children when they were tiny. I saw James, young and shirtless, chasing them through Mama's garden. Off in the distance I saw Barbara Jean and Clarice, and even myself when we were kids, dancing to music pouring out of my old pink and violet portable record player. Here I was with my fingers brushing up against the frame of the picture I'd been painting for the last fifty-five years, and my beautiful, scarred husband, my happy children, and my laughing friends were right there with me. — Edward Kelsey Moore

Your brother?" St. Clair points above my bed to the only picture I've hung up. Seany is grinning at the camera and pointing at one of my mother's research turtles,which is lifting its neck and threatening to take away his finger. Mom is doing a study on the lifetime reproductive habits of snapping turtles and visits her brood in the Chattahoochie River several times a month. My brother loves to go with her, while I prefer the safety of our home. Snapping turtles are mean.
"Yep.That's Sean."
"That's a little Irish for a family with tartan bedspreads."
I smile. "It's kind of a sore spot. My mom loved the name,but Granddad-my father's father-practically died when he heard it.He was rooting for Malcolm or Ewan or Dougal instead."
St. Clair laughs. "How old is he?"
"Seven.He's in the second grade."
"That's a big age difference."
"Well,he was either an accident or a last-ditch effort to save a failing marriage.I've never had the nerve to ask which. — Stephanie Perkins

Don't get me wrong. I like Disney World. The rest rooms are clean enough for neurosurgery, and the employees say things like "Howdy, folks!" and actually seem to mean it. You wonder: Where do they get these people? My guess: 1952. I think old Walt realized, way back then, that there would eventually be a shortage of cheerful people, so he put all the residents of south western Nebraska into a giant freezer with a huge picture of Jiminy Cricket on the outside, and the corporation has been thawing them out as needed ever since. — Dave Barry

My very favorite wrestler of all time was Andre the Giant. He was sort of like my best friend, believe it or not, and I have a picture in 'People' magazine of me sitting on his lap when I was 8 years old after 'WrestleMania I.' — Stephanie McMahon

Because despite the undeniable knowledge that I wasn't human - or mostly human, anyway - despite the proof the computer screen had show in the repair room, I still picture my interior just the same as any other sixteen-year-old girl's. Blood and guts and bones. A brain, and a functioning heart. Hopes and dreams, fears and sorrow. They could tell me the truth, but they couldn't force me to accept it. — Debra Driza

And I don't like having my picture taken. I'm almost like an old African in that sense. I think it steals a bit of the soul. — Eric Clapton

I like to take pictures of lots of things: people-such as my nephews, my dogs, and just interesting objects that I see. For instance, I might take a picture of flowers by the side of the road, an old sign or a fence. — Lacey Chabert

Late-Flowering Lust

My head is bald, my breath is bad,
Unshaven is my chin,
I have not now the joys I had
When I was young in sin.
I run my fingers down your dress
With brandy-certain aim
And you respond to my caress
And maybe feel the same.
But I've a picture of my own
On this reunion night,
Wherein two skeletons are shewn
To hold each other tight;
Dark sockets look on emptiness
Which once was loving-eyed,
The mouth that opens for a kiss
Has got no tongue inside.
I cling to you inflamed with fear
As now you cling to me,
I feel how frail you are my dear
And wonder what will be--
A week? or twenty years remain?
And then--what kind of death?
A losing fight with frightful pain
Or a gasping fight for breath?
Too long we let our bodies cling,
We cannot hide disgust
At all the thoughts that in us spring
From this late-flowering lust. — John Betjeman

I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself. — Oscar Wilde

There is something poignantly pathetic in the picture of this valiant fighter - this arrogant ja-sager - this foe of men, gods and devils - being nursed and coddled like a little child. His old fierce pride and courage disappeared and he became docile and gentle. "You and I, my sister - we are happy!" he would say, and then his hand would slip out from his coverings and clasp that of the tender and faithful Lisbeth. Once she mentioned Wagner to him. "Den habe ich sehr geliebt!" he said. All his old fighting spirit was gone. He remembered only the glad days and the dreams of his youth. — H.L. Mencken

There is a black-and-white picture in my hallway, of me, Nancy, and Lizzie in the bath, when Nancy was eight months old and Lizzie two-and-a-half. I am gently biting Lizzie. Nancy, in turn, is gumming my face. All eyes are on the person taking the picture - Pete, who was, as the slight camera-wobble shows, laughing. There we are-a tangle of half-shared DNA, all interlocking with each other; all being watched over by the one who loves us best. If I had to explain to someone what happiness is, I would show them this picture. — Caitlin Moran

I took photos from 1976 to when I left in 1993, primarily for Interview and a column I had called "Bob Colacello's Out" which Andy had conceived of. I've never taken a picture since, not even with my phone! It just felt too Andy Warhol to keep going around town taking photographs. And I never really thought of doing anything with them after I left the magazine until this great Art Director Sam Shahid about for or five years ago asked where all of the old photos were. — Bob Colacello

I am trying to heighten my feeling for the organic rhythm in all things, trying to establish a pantheistic contact with the tremor and flow of blood in nature, in animals, in the air - trying to make it all into a picture, with new movements and with colours that reduce our old easel paintings to absurdity. — Franz Marc

We flew to Los Angeles, where I secured a new passport. The picture in my stolen one wasn't half bad, but in the new one I look like a penis with an old person's face drawn on it. — David Sedaris

People always make fun of my eyebrows and think that I shape them this way! But if you see a picture of me from when I was two years old, I have the same exact eyebrow shape. — Gigi Hadid

Still have your passport?"
I feel my coat once more. "Got it."
"Good." And then his hand is inside my pocket.My heart spazzes,but he doesn't notice.He pulls out my passport and flicks it open.
WAIT.WHY DOES HE HAVE MY PASSPORT?
His eyebrows shoot up.I try to snatch it back,but he holds it out of my reach. "Why are your eyes crossed?" He laughs. "Have you had some kind of ocular surgery I don't know about?"
"Give it back?" Another grab and miss, and I change tactics and lunge for his coat instead. I snag his passport.
"NO!"
I open it up,and it's ... baby St. Clair. "Dude.How old is this picture?"
He slings my passport at me and snatches his back. "I was in middle school. — Stephanie Perkins

I was feeling like an old puzzle that someone put away, the kind that's missing pieces so it never gets looked at. It isn't until I came across the woman that now holds my last name that I see it clearly. She's the collection of pieces that are missing from my box. She completes it and turns it into the most beautiful picture. — Melyssa Winchester

I always gave her a book. An old hardback from the same section in the used bookstore where you'd find Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and musty scrawled-in Hobbits, the painted paper covers often ripped or gone ...
My favorite was a sort of illustrated guidebook of pond creatures on which a very young child had written in pencil on each page under the picture of an otter
I love otter
Under a muskrat:
I love muskrat
Beaver:
I love beaver — Peter Heller

Perseus Jackson, I do expect you to
refrain from causing any more trouble. "
"Trouble?" I demanded.
Dionysus snapped his fingers. A newspaper appeared on the table-the front page of today's
New York Post, There was my yearbook picture from Meriwether Prep. It was hard for me to
make out the headline, but I had a pretty good guess what it said. Something like: ... Perseus Jackson, I do expect you to
refrain from causing any more trouble. "
"Trouble?" I demanded.
Dionysus snapped his fingers. A newspaper appeared on the table-the front page of today's
New York Post, There was my yearbook picture from Meriwether Prep. It was hard for me to
make out the headline, but I had a pretty good guess what it said. Something like: Thirteen-
Year-Old Lunatic Torches Gymnasium. — Rick Riordan

I have attempted to draw an accurate and unexaggerated picture of my family in the following pages; they appear as I saw them. To explain some of their more curious ways, however, I feel that I should state that at the time we were in Corfu the family were all quite young: Larry, the eldest, was 23; Leslie was 19; Margo was 18; while I was the youngest, being of the tender and impressionble age of 10. We had never been certain of my mother's age for the simple reason she could never remember her date of birth; all I can say is she was old enough to have four children. My mother also insists that I explain that she is a widow for, as she so penetratingly observed, you never know what people might think. — Gerald Durrell

Huge Jackman has divorced his wife and happened upon my picture in some old article and decided that I'm the woman for him?

~ Susan — Sherrilyn Kenyon

It was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words ofthe Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint's picture. — Mary McCarthy

When my old man wanted sex, my mother would show him a picture of me. — Rodney Dangerfield

And then there's the truth beyond that, sitting like an old rock under green creek water: none of these things matter. Right now, in this moment, we have love. We have it in the sound of my daughter's laugher, in Mom's and Georgia's locked fingers, in the warm pressure of J.T.'s hand. It will leave, and it will come again, and when it does I'll give up everything and take it. Just like an addict. Like dry grass in new rain. It's not something I'm proud of necessarily. Then again, maybe I am. — Katie Crouch

Sloanes aren't cafe society or NYLON hedge-funders with million-pound bonuses, or London Eurotrash wearing upgraded style anglais. Ann Barr's and my original picture of them in 'The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook,' published in 1982, was of an upper-middle-class world, conservative and fairly homogeneous, united by old attitudes and institutions. — Peter York

I think she cried at my funeral. It's not that I'm conceited or anything, but I'm pretty sure. Sometimes I can actually picture her talking about me to some guy she feels close to. Talking about me dying. About how they lowered me into the grave, kind of shrivelled up and pitiful, like an old chocolate bar. About how we never really got a chance. And afterwards the guy fucks her, a fuck that's all about making her feel better. — Etgar Keret

Nikhilananda's birthday. Maybe we'd Morris dance, naked, around the base of an old-growth California redwood, its branches lavishly festooned with the soiled hammocks and poop buckets of crunchy-granola tree sitters mentoring spotted owls in passive-resistance protest techniques. You get the picture. In place of Santa Claus, my mom and dad said Maya Angelou kept tabs on whether little children were naughty or nice. Dr. Angelou, they warned me, did her accounting on a long hemp scroll of names, and if I failed to turn my compost I'd be sent to bed with no algae. Me, I just wanted to know that someone wise and carbon neutral - Dr. Maya or Shirley Chisholm or Sean Penn - was paying attention. But none of that was really Christmas. And none of that Earth First! baloney helps out once you're dead and you discover that the snake-handling, — Chuck Palahniuk

For years I'd been awaiting that overriding urge I'd always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless women ineluctably to strangers' strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the hormonal imperative, to wake one day and throw my arms around your neck, reach down for you, and pray that while that black flower bloomed behind my eyes you had just left me with child. (With child: There's a lovely warm sound to that expression, an archaic but tender acknowledgement that for nine months you have company wherever you go. Pregnant, by contrast, is heavy and bulging and always sounds to my ear like bad news: "I'm pregnant." I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table- pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend- forcing herself to blurt out her mother's deepest fear.) (27) — Lionel Shriver

It is the nature of a nine-year-old mind to believe that each extreme experience signifies a lasting change in the quality of life henceforth. A bad day raises the expectation of a long chain of grim days through dismal decades, and a day of joy inspires an almost giddy certainty that the years thereafter will be marked by endless blessings. In fact, time teaches us that the musical score of life oscillates between that of Psycho and that of The Sound of Music, with by far the greatest number of our days lived to the strains of an innocuous and modestly budgeted picture, sometimes a romance sometimes a like comedy sometimes a little art film of puzzling purpose and elusive meeting. Yet I've known adults who live forever in that odd conviction of nine-year-olds. Because I am an optimist and always have been, the expectation of continued joy comes more easily to me than pessimism, which was especially true during that period of my childhood. — Dean Koontz

When I was four years old they tried to test my IQ, they showed me this picture of three oranges and a pear. They asked me which one is different and does not belong; they taught me different was wrong. — Ani DiFranco

My grief is my castle, which like an eagle's nest is built high up on the mountain peaks among the clouds; nothing can storm it. From it I fly down into reality to seize my prey; but i do not remain down there, I bring it home with me, and this prey is a picture I weave into the tapestries of my palace. There I live as one dead. I immerse everything I have experienced in a baptism of forgetfulness unto an eternal remembrance. Everything finite and accidental is forgotten and erased. Then I sit like an old man, grey-haired and thoughtful, and explain the pictures in a voice as soft as a whisper; and at my side a child sits and listens, although he remembers everything before I tell it. — Soren Kierkegaard

I let my gaze travel out the picture window. Unlike at my old doublewide trailer perched on the fringe of a played out quarry, here I owned a real yard with real grass that screamed for mowing each Monday a.m. I sat at the kitchen table, cooling off from just having finished this week's job. Yes, here in 2005, I was a full-fledged suburbanite, but I'd been called worse. — Ed Lynskey

Is it? Because that picture of me was taken by my old school's yearbook club, and they put it in the section titled 'STUDENT FAILSAUCES! XD.
What's an XD?
A sideways laughing face of horrendous proportions. Don't change the subject. — Sara Wolf

Beauty
isn't all about tooth whiteners, hard abs, and hundred-dollar lipstick. Beauty is
about growing old together, remembering when together, laughing together. If my
picture disgusts you, fine. Go look at the faces of women who named a price you
can buy them for. I'm not the kind of woman who will ever be for sale, and shame
on you for not expecting more from a woman, or from yourself. — Virginia Nelson