Picture That Says Quotes & Sayings

Rosy's mummy hands Franny a clear plastic bag full of reject biscuits, then Rosy holds her cheek out for Franny's wet kiss. Rosy wipes the slime from her face and Franny cackles, then shows them both into the lounge.
There on Franny's coffee table is a biscuit tin with a Christmas picture on the lid. Proper shop-bought biscuits, not factory rejects.
"Please, may I have a biscuit?" Rosy says.
"Oh, there are no biscuits in that my darling," Franny says, and pulls the tin from Rosy's prying fingers. Franny holds open the bag of crumb-speckled chocolate digestives. "Help yourself, my wee hen."
Rosy settles for a reject.
Franny puts the Christmas tin up high, way up high, way out of reach. — R.G. Manse

Someone can intentionally fake blindness for some secondary gain (malingering)
a prisoner who says he can't see in order to try to avoid going directly to jail. It is not difficult to figure out when patients say they are blind but can actually see. We have a simple test that lets us determine whether the eyes are functioning. Using a rotating striped drum, we test for something called optokinetic nystagmus. as the drum spins, normal eyes will be seen moving back and forth.
If a striped rotating drum is not available, you can always use a picture of J. Lo's rear. Move it back and forth, and any normal eyes will follow. — Mark Leyner

Certain things are extremely difficult to understand, such as the concept of unconditional love, perhaps it is due to mislead thoughts about God's love for us. Assuming that we can say or do certain things and suddenly lose this love and approval. But I when I picture God I picture him standing with his arms out saying, "Beth stop punishing yourself." And he says it like my dad used to say, with such great authority and assurance in his voice that I can't help but smile, and know it's gonna be ok. — Bethany Brookbank

On the wall of his rehabilitation room was a picture of the space shuttle blasting off, autographed by every astronaut now at NASA. On top of the picture it says, "We found nothing is impossible." That should be our motto. — Christopher Reeve

It's rare, he says, that we "encounter a person who asserts vehemently that the mere thought of reading a novel, or looking at a picture, or seeing a movie causes him insufferable torment," but "sensible, educated people" often say "with a remarkable blend of defiance and pride" that math is "pure torture" or a "nightmare" that "turns them off. — Edward Frenkel

Some movies you fall a step behind, and some you stay in the same place, make the same choices. And then sometimes there are people who know more than you but show you, and that's the maximum you can hope for - doing that with someone who says, 'I like you for what you are, and I want you to be in my picture.' — Jake Gyllenhaal

More investment sins are probably committed by otherwise quite intelligent people because of "tax considerations" than from any other cause. One of my friends-a noted West Coast philosopher-maintains that a majority of life's errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do. This is certainly the case when an emotionally supercharged element like taxes enters the picture (I have another friend-a noted East Coast philosopher who says it isn't the lack of representation he minds-it's the taxation). — Warren Buffett

I send the picture in a message to Ian that says, She's gonna have all my babies. — Colleen Hoover

She's not my nurse but she comes up to Gran and Gramps just the same. "Don't you doubt for a second that she can hear you," she tells them. "She's aware if everything that's going on." She stands there with her hands on her hip. I can almost picture her snapping gum. Gran and Gramps stare at her, lapping up what she's telling them. "You might think the doctors or nurses or all this equipment is running the show," she says, gesturing to the wall of medical equipment. "Nuh-uh. She's running the show. Maybe she's just biding her time. So you talk to her. You tell her to take all the time she needs, but to come on back. You're waiting for her. — Gayle Forman

It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country — Oscar Wilde

Sometimes I want to just pull the off switch, but you can't because if you go outside, you have to give people your all. You can't say, 'Oh, you know what? I'm not feeling good today.' No. No one's trying to hear that. When a woman comes up to you and says, 'Hey, my daughter's your biggest fan. Can we have a picture?' - you can't say no. — Nicki Minaj

What's that supposed to be anyway?" said Fred squinting at Dobby's painting. "Looks like a Gibbon with two black eyes!" "It's Harry," said George pointing at the back of the picture. "Says so on the back." "Good likeness," said Fred grinning. Harry threw his new homework diary at him. — J.K. Rowling

Peg came over with dinner tonight and told me about this dumb schmaltzy poem she heard someone read at an AA meeting. It got me thinking. It was about how while we are on earth, our limitations are such that we can only see the underside of the tapestry that God is weaving. God sees the topside, the whole evolving portrait and its amazing beauty, and uses us as the pieces of thread to weave the picture. We see the glorious colors and shadings, but we also see the knots and the threads hanging down, the think lumpy patches, the tangles. But God and the people in heaven with him see how beautiful the portraits in the tapestry are. The poem says in this flowery way that faith is about the willingness to be used by God wherever and however he most needs you, most needs the piece of thread that is your life. You give him your life to put through his needle, to use as he sees fit. — Anne Lamott

People think genius a fine thing if it enables a man to write an exciting poem, or paint a picture, But in its true sense, that of originality in thought and action, though no one says that it is not a thing to be admired, nearly all, at heart, think that they can do very well without it. Unhappily this is too natural to be wondered at. Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. They cannot see what it is to do for them: how should they? If they could see what it would do for them, it would not be originality. — John Stuart Mill

I could almost picture how when God was reaching down and closing the door of the ark, Noah might have been in there standing on tiptoe trying to see out for as long as he could. The Bible says Noah was six hundred years old when he went into the ark. I bet he noticed things in that last minute that he hadn't paid any attention at all to for the last five hundred fifty years. I — Douglas Kaine McKelvey

What does she even eat, do you think?"
"Tea fungus,"Ruth says. "Unsweetened. From an eye dropper. Is what I picture. either that or some sort of sea vegetable."
"Sad," I say.
"It is," Ruth muses.
We decide to order two skim milk cappuccinos and split a gluten-free carrot cake cupcake. — Mona Awad

I do a lot of work in travel and tourism, and I think this story is in the book. This woman is in a hammock, and she's got the beach below her and the sky above her, and the ocean beyond her. She's relaxing. She's got a drink in her hand and a book. Every woman sees this picture and says, I want to be in that hammock. Every guy sees the picture and says, I want to be in that hammock with that woman. It works for everybody. — Frank Luntz

MAINTAINING DOCTRINAL PURITY IS good, but it is not the whole picture for a New Testament church. The apostles wanted to do much more than simply "hold the fort," as the old gospel song says. They asked God to empower them to move out and impact an entire culture. In too many places where the Bible is being thumped and doctrine is being argued until three in the morning, the Spirit of that doctrine is missing. William Law, an English devotional writer of the early 1700s, wrote, "Read whatever chapter of Scripture you will, and be ever so delighted with it - yet it will leave you as poor, as empty and unchanged as it found you unless it has turned you wholly and solely to the Spirit of God, and brought you into full union with and dependence upon him."1 — Jim Cymbala

They can't expect anyone to actually pay for a shirt that says, 'I (picture of an elephant) the San Diego Zoo.' What does that even mean? — Adam Rex

The child affixes one of her little pictures to my refrigerator.
She asks, Can you detect the radiation?

There is a house, one tree, and grass in dark slashes. A sun
shining. Beneath, in her child letters, she has written Chernobyl.

At kindergarten they must be having nuclear energy week.

One could look at the picture and say everything is in order.
No, I say, I cannot see the radiation.

The radiation poison, she says, sits
inside the apple and the apple looks pretty. Then singsongs,

Bury the apple and bury the shovel that buried the apple
and put the apple-burier person in a closet forever.

We are both thinking Then bury the burier.
Both thinking of her picture with no people.

The poison sits inside the people and the people
still look pretty, she says. — Darcie Dennigan

The reality is that every movie is a new business. Nobody says, 'Hey, let's go down to the Pantages Theater, I hear a Warner Brothers picture is playing there.' Or, 'Let's go to this theater, I hear the film came in on budget.' It'd be ridiculous. — Peter Guber

It must be hard," Ash said, "living half your life without someone."
... "Everyone says that." Kalama stared thoughtfully at the lemon that was floating in her iced tea. "But picture that man you love. Now ask yourself: Would you rather live half your life with him? Or all of it without him, with someone else instead? When you look at it that way, the choice is much easier than you think. — Karsten Knight

The Simi has needs. Lots of needs. I need akri's plastic card, for one thing. It very nice. People give me lots of stuff when I hand it to them. Ooo, I really like the new plastic card he gave me with my own name on it. It blue and all sparkly and it says Simi Parthenopaeus. Doesn't that have a nice ring to it? I have to say it again. Simi Parthenopaeus. I like that a lot. It even has my picture in the corner and I am a very attractive demon if I do say so myself. Akri says it, too. 'Simi, you are beautiful.' I like it when he tells me that. (Simi) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The dark picture which St. Paul, in addressing the Romans, draws of the heathenism of his day, is fully sustained by Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal, Persius, and other heathen writers of that age, and shows the absolute need of redemption. "The world," says Seneca, in a famous passage, "is full of crimes and vices. More are committed than can be cured by force. There is an immense struggle for iniquity. Crimes are no longer bidden, but open before the eyes. Innocence is not only rare, but nowhere."83 — Philip Schaff

If I was going to be a woman, I would want to be as beautiful as possible. And they said to me, 'Uh, that's as beautiful as we can get you.' And I went home and started crying to my wife, and I said, 'I have to make this picture.' And she said, 'Why?' And I said, 'Because I think I'm an interesting woman when I look at myself on screen, and I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character because she doesn't fulfill, physically, the demands that we're brought up to think that women have to have in order for us to ask them out.' She says, 'What are you saying?' and I said, 'There's too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.' It was not what it felt like to be a woman. It was what it felt like to be someone that people didn't respect, for the wrong reasons. I know it's a comedy. But comedy's a serious business. — Dustin Hoffman

I picture it like Judgement Day,' he says finally, his eyes on the water. 'We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost. — Jennifer Egan

The kiss is the greatest of gifts, a miracle, uniquely human. A kiss beneath the mistletoe. A kiss after midnight. A kiss before dying. The devil's kiss. As a picture tells a thousand words, so a kiss says everything that's important. I am told prostitutes never kiss their clients. It is too personal, too human. We kiss to say I love you. We kiss the rings of the self-important. The feet of conquerors. The rich dark earth when we reach the promised land. We kiss our hands and wave as loved ones begin a journey. We kiss strangers before dawn in the first hours of a New Year because our wintry lips are incomplete until they are oiled by a kiss. — Chloe Thurlow

It was a little like Into the Sands, with Claude Barron, which she'd seen a couple of weeks ago. In that picture Claude Barron enlists in the Foreign Legion because Rita Carrol marries another guy. The other guy turns out to be a cheater and drinker, and so Rita Carrol leaves him and travels out to the desert where Claude Barron if fighting the Arabs. By the time Rita Carrol gets there he's in the hospital, wounded, or not a hospital really but just a tent and she tells him she loves him and Claude Barron says, "I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you." And then he dies. Tessie cried buckets. Her mascara ran, staining the collar of her blouse something awful. — Jeffrey Eugenides

When someone says to you, 'Oh, I don't take a good picture,' what they mean is they haven't come to terms with how they look. They take a fine picture, it's just that their image of how they think they look is not in touch with the reality. — Martin Parr

How to Love the Dead
She lives, the bird says, and means nothing
silly. She is dead and available
the fox says, knowing about the spirits.
Not the picture at the funeral,
not the object of grieving. She is dead
and you can have that, he says. If you can
love without politeness or delicacy,
the fox says, love her with your wolf heart.
As the dead are to be desired.
Not the way long marriages are,
nothing happening again and again,
Not in the woods or in the fields.
Not in the cities. The painful love of being
permanently unhoused. Not the color, but the stain. — Jack Gilbert

Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don't think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, "OK, here's this problem that we have- how can we solve it?" The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That's engineering. — Philip Greenspun

We think that there is this terrible idea that the kids are digital natives ... and they know what they're doing, but all the evidence says that they're hanging around going, 'Where are you, I'm here, can I post my picture?' They're not actually writing wikis; they're not actually listening to great poets live. — Beeban Kidron

I am pessimistic about a picture's power to be the emissary of just one thing. What I hope is that the picture says, "Here I am, this is what I am like," and the person seeing the picture says in return, 'You know a lot but you don't know half of what I know.' — Emmet Gowin

The biggest ambition in my career is still to win the European Cup. I want to have a picture of that to look at later; I want to have that medal. You can have a contract that is better than your friends, but no player looks back and says: 'I won more money.' — Fernando Torres

I try to express with the camera what the story is, to get to the heart of the story with picture. In battle I look at things first in terms of people, second in terms of strategies or casualties ... To tell a story, you don't photograph one hundred dead civilians to prove there were one hundred dead civilians. You photograph one dead civilian with an expression on his face that says, This is what it's like if you're a dead civilian in Vietnam. — Horst Faas

It is not enough to be abstinent with other people, you also have to be abstinent alone. The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. You can't masturbate without lust! ... You're going to be pleasing each other. And if he already knows what pleases him and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture? — Christine O'Donnell

The world outside of me has no meaning independent of my thinking it. (pauses to look) I look out of the window. A garden. Trees. Grass. A young woman in a chair reading a book. I think: chair. So she is sitting. I think: book. So she is reading. Now the young woman touches her hair where it's come undone. But how can we be sure there is a world of phenomena, a woman reading in a garden? Perhaps the only thing that's real is my sensory experience, which has the form of a woman reading- in a universe which is in fact empty! But Immanuel Kant says- no! Because what I perceive as reality includes concepts which I cannot experience through the senses. Time and space. Cause and effect. Relations between things. Without me there is something wrong with this picture. The trees, the grass, the woman are merely- oh, she's coming! (nervously)- she's coming in here-! I say, don't leave!-where are you going? — Tom Stoppard

It's kind of freaky to send your picture over the Internet to someone you don't really know and then have to sit waiting for their judgement on how you look. Maybe that's why my aunt Penny, who got divorced two years ago, hates online dating so much. Mom's always nagging her to go back on Match but Aunt Penny says she'd rather have root canal work - without anesthetic. — Sarah Darer Littman

We'd known each other over a very short period of time. He left France in June of 1964, and I'm writing this in April 1992. I never received word from him and I don't know if he's dead or alive. The memory of him had remained dormant, but now it has suddenly come flooding back this early spring of 1992. Is it because I came across the picture of my girlfriend and me, on the back of which a blue stamp says Photo by Jansen. All rights reserved? Or for the simple reason that every spring looks the same? Today the air was light, the buds had burst on the trees in the gardens of the Observatoire, and the month of April 1992 merged by an effect of superimposition with the month of April 1964. — Patrick Modiano

I suppose that by this time they had finished their dressing. Roger Scurvilegs tells us nothing on such important matters; no doubt from modesty. "Next morning they rose," he says, and disappoints us of a picture of Udo brushing his hair. — A.A. Milne

Picture a bird perched on a thin branch, she [Miss Saeki] says. 'The branch sways in the wind, and each time this happens the bird's field of vision shifts. You know what I mean?'
I nod.
'When that happens, how do you think the bird adjusts?'
I shake my head. 'I don't know.'
'It bobs its head up and down, making up for the sway of the branch. Take a good look at birds the next time it's windy. I spend a lot of time looking out that window. Don't you think that kind of life would be tiresome? Always shifting your head every time the branch you're on sways?'
'I do.'
'Birds are used to it. It comes naturally to them. They don't have to think about it, they just do it. So it's not as tiring as we imagine. But I'm a human being, not a bird, so sometimes it does get tiring. — Haruki Murakami

Heaven is boring. Didn't you see, in that picture book back when we used to go to school? It's just plain and white and there is not even any color and it's too orderly. Like there will be crazy prefects telling you all the time: Do thus, don't do that, where are your shoes, tuck in your shirt, shhh, God doesn't like it and will punish you, keep your voice low you'll wake the angels, go and wash, you are dirty, Bastard says.
Me, when I die I want to go where there's lots of food and music and a party that never ends and we're singing that Jobho song, Godknows says. — NoViolet Bulawayo

Mom. She always says to look at the big picture. How all of the little things don't matter in the long run ... I know that Mom is right about the big picture. But Dad is right too: Life is really just a bunch of nows, one after the other. The dots matter. — Rebecca Stead

There is an old-fashioned distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident, which must have cost many a smile to the intending romancer who was keen about his work. It appears to me as little to the point as the equally celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance- to answer as little to any reality. There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture, one says of character, when one says novel, one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? — Henry James

Success comes as a result of preparing oneself for inspiration, and then being willing to pay attention to it and do what it says. I've learned that before I make big decisions, I must first have a clear picture in mind and on paper of the outcome I am seeking. — Leslie Householder

Was it Jesus you saw a picture of?" he says and looks up at me. If it had not been for the friendly voice and the long pause before the question, I would have thought he was making fun of me. He finds it a little embarrassing that I am a Christian; all he wants is for me not to be different from the other kids, and of all the kids in the neighbourhood, his youngest son is the only one to call himself a Christian.
But he is really wondering about this.
I feel a flutter of joy because he actually cares, and at the same time I become a bit offended that he underestimates me like that.
I shake my head.
"It wasn't Jesus," I say. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Rampton suggested that one could derive a "fair picture of a man's true attitudes and motives from what he says and from the kind of people he associates with and speaks to. — Deborah E. Lipstadt

I think I look for a muse in women. Someone I can just picture in my mind. Someone who respects herself and others. It isn't so much the things she says, it's mainly what she does. That's what make her all the more beautiful. — JC Chasez

My father knew my husband long before I ever did. He actually always says that he loved him first ... there really was this wonderful respect and admiration between the two of them before I even came into the picture. — Stephanie McMahon

That crown on her head is very heavy, that's why she is smiling like that, smiling like she just ate a whole bunch of unripe guavas. It's heavy because it's made of gold, Godknows says.
I thought crowns were made of thorns. I saw a picture of it in the Bible, when they were killing Jesus, Sbho says. — NoViolet Bulawayo

Children will draw pictures with everything in them ... houses and trees and people and animals ... and the sun AND the moon. Grown-up says, "That's a nice picture, Honey, but you put the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time and that isn't right." But the child is right! The sun and moon are in the sky at the same time. — R. Buckminster Fuller

My mom tries to comfort me by saying that girls like Heather Campbell tend to peak early in life and then quickly fade. That's why she looks so much better than everyone now. But by the time I go to my ten-year reunion, I'll be way prettier than she is. To which I always reply with the same statement, "I don't want to be pretty in ten years. I want to be pretty now."
Because what good is it to me now that I might or might not be drop-dead gorgeous when I'm twenty-seven? It's not like I can go to school every day with a big cardboard sign around my neck that says, "Trust me, in ten years, I'll look like this." And then an arrow pointing to a picture of a supermodel. — Jessica Brody

So perhaps the reason I shuddered at the idea of writing something about 'Christian art' is that to paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an incarnational activity. The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birth-giver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary, who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command. Obedience is an unpopular word nowadays, but the artist must be obedient to the work, whether it be a symphony, a painting, or a story for a small child. I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius or something very small, comes to the artist and says 'Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.' And the artist either says 'My soul doth magnify the Lord' and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessicarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary. — Madeleine L'Engle

Sexuality isn't ancillary to Christianity, in the way some other cultural or political issues are. Marriage and sex point, the Bible says, to a picture of the gospel itself, the union of Christ and his church. This is why the Bible spends so much time, as some critics would put it, "obsessed" with sex. That's why, historically, churches that liberalize on sex tend to liberalize themselves right out of Christianity itself. — Russell D. Moore

The last thing DeMille added to his $13 million film before he delivered the final negative to Paramount was his introduction that ran before the opening credits, filmed with him standing behind a microphone in front of a blue-and-white curtain (the colors of the Israeli flag). His intention was to emphasize the "importance" of what the audience was about to see and how authentic the film really was, and to make the spiritual connection to the Holocaust. DeMille says, in part: "The theme of this picture is whether man ought to be ruled by God's law, or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses. Are men the property of the state or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today. Our intention was not to create a story, but to be worthy of the divinely inspired story, created three thousand years ago . . ." The introduction was almost always cut after the film's initial run. That — Marc Eliot