Fake Image Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Fake Image. Here they are! All 100 of them:

A persons character is shown through their actions in life NOT where they sit on Sunday.
Navonne Johns
Fake people have image to maintain, real people just don't care.
Hikigaya Hachiman
I always am in a role, lovely – for you, for them – even for myself. Yeah... Even when I’m alone, I am still in a role – and I myself am the most exacting audience I have ever had.
Simona Panova (Nightmarish Sacrifice (Cardew))
A man's alter ego is nothing more than his favorite image of himself.
Stan Redding (Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake)
It's not the appearance that makes a man, it's the man that makes an appearance.
Anthony Liccione
My theory was that if I behaved like a confident, cheerful person, eventually I would buy it myself, and become that. I always had traces of strength somewhere inside me, it wasn't fake, it was just a way of summoning my courage to the fore and not letting any creeping self-doubt hinder my adventures. This method worked then, and it works now. I tell myself that I am the sort of person who can open a one-woman play in the West End, so I do. I am the sort of person who has several companies, so I do. I am the sort of person WHO WRITES A BOOK! So I do. It's the process of having faith in the self you don't quite know you are yet, if you see what I mean. Believing that you will find the strength, the means somehow, and trusting in that, although your legs are like jelly. You can still walk on them and you will find the bones as you walk. Yes, that's it. The further I walk, the stronger I become. So unlike the real lived life, where the further you walk, the more your hips hurt.
Dawn French (Dear Fatty)
In the last 10 years, we have seen a rise in selfishness: selfies, self-absorbed people, superficiality, self-degradation, apathy, and self-destruction. So I challenge all of you to take initiative to change this programming. Instead of celebrating the ego, let's flip the script and celebrate the heart. Let's put the ego and celebrity culture to sleep, and awaken the conscience. This is the battle we must all fight together to win back our humanity. To save our future and our children.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Fake people have an image to maintain. Real people just don't care
Hikigaya Hachiman
A MAN’S ALTER EGO is nothing more than his favorite image of himself.
Frank W. Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake)
She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor. The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground. One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.
Jess C. Scott (Jack in the Box)
I thought Oliver was trying hard before, but now I realize it's quite the opposite-- he doesn't try, he just is, makes up his mind and doesn't check if it's going to work for his image or come off wrong. Since the rest of us are being so self-aware, his presence seems calculated. No one can possibly be that breezy, saying what he thinks, feeling what he feels. I can see why people don't like him for this very reason-- it's so much easier to call him a poser. Because if he's the real deal, then that makes the rest of us fakes.
Lindsey Leavitt (Going Vintage)
Images are deceiving. Salt and sugar look exactly the same but taste very different.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
The people of today would rather stand next to a man with no substance but covered in gold, rather than the man with substance and wisdom of gold. What if God was dressed as a carpenter with dirty nails and beaten boots? Would you recognize your Maker? Would you give him your time? Your vote? A cup of tea or water? Only those with truth in them will recognize truth. And you must learn to recognize all that is untrue to get the truth.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
The question is not: do we believe in God? but rather: does God believe in us? And the answer is: only an unbeliever could have created our image of God: and only a fake God could be satisfied with it.
Kenneth Patchen (The Journal of Albion Moonlight)
Sometimes you get an image of someone stuck in your head and then you can't let go of it even after they show you they've changed. All you can see is that one side of them.
Rebecca Phillips (Faking Perfect)
Social media is the “Greatest Hits” album of our lives.
Marc Fienberg (Dad's Great Advice for Teens)
The secret of living well is: drop the past, drop the fake image, help others, smile a lot, eat half and walk double.
Amit Ray (Beautify your Breath - Beautify your Life)
And narcissists don’t love themselves. They hardly have any selves to begin with. They put all their energy into the fake image that they wear like a mask. Only there’s nothing but dead space behind it.
Koren Zailckas (Mother, Mother)
The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life. Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me? There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.
Jonathan Franzen
If you cannot treat everyone with same respect as you give to your pastor, then you are a fake person.
Sunday Adelaja (Create Your Own Net Worth)
Every day the world feeds you fakeness; be courageous enough to stay real.
Allene vanOirschot (Daddy's Little Girl: A Father's Prayer)
(...) ha! what is hope? a butterfly in a box of demons, and nothing escapes the dark untainted, a mockery of politics and greed stamped with treason and dipped in myths and force-fed brainwashing going off after a time for the grand massacre of faith, humanity, and still we search, scorched feet for life but find only fake plastic trees satirical, ludicrous, and ironic
Moonie
A real man cries. A man that does not cry is a man who is trying to either impress others on the fake strength he possesses or is too blind on what society thinks what the image of a "real" man is...
Kenneth G. Ortiz
But now more often the old stale hopeless weariness overcame him: the black sickness which almost no one else, certainly not his nearest dearest friends, could understand at all. The idea of giving up the world, which had given him for a time so much life-energy, appeared now as a sort of fake suicide, a ghastly play-image of his death. This fatal falseness-of-heart was what perhaps Father Damien, on further acquaintance, had now seen in him.
Iris Murdoch (The Green Knight)
How difficult it has become to decipher the truth from the fictitious, to trust one’s own eyes over the art of image distortion. Information is power and if readings have taught us anything, it is that power inevitably corrupts.
Aysha Taryam
Do I worry about overly retouched photos giving women unrealistic expectations and body image issues? I do. I think that we will soon see a rise in anorexia in women over seventy. Because only people over seventy are fooled by Photoshop. Only your great-aunt forwards you an image of Sarah Palin holding a rifle and wearing an American-flag bikini and thinks it’s real. Only your uncle Vic sends a photo of Barack Obama wearing a hammer and sickle T-shirt and has to have it explained to him that somebody faked that with the computer.
Tina Fey (Bossypants)
nothing more than his favorite image of himself. The mirror in my room in the Windsor Hotel in Paris reflected my favorite image of me—a darkly handsome young airline pilot, smooth-skinned, bull-shouldered and immaculately groomed. Modesty is not one of my virtues.
Frank W. Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake)
Coolness is not an image that can be bought or worn. True cool is an attitude that is projected from a person who is extremely comfortable in their own skin.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
A man's alter ego is nothing more than his favorite image of himself.
Frank W. Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake)
nothing more than his favorite image of himself. The mirror in my room in the Windsor Hotel in Paris reflected my favorite image of me—a darkly handsome young airline pilot, smooth-skinned, bull-shouldered and immaculately groomed. Modesty is not one of my virtues. At the time, virtue was not one of my virtues.
Frank W. Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake)
No, let me finish. There isn’t beauty in perfection. It’s as fake as the image the word projects. Beauty is found in imperfection, Willow, because to admit you’re not perfect means you’re admitting you’re not whole and absolute. When I think of myself, I see someone willing to admit he’s as far from complete as it gets because, in order to get to that perfection, I need to find the other part of me who will make my life better. To take all the faults I have and fill them, and only then will I be there. You see, the way I see it, the only way to become perfect is to find that perfectly imperfect person who brings it out of you.
Harper Sloan (Perfectly Imperfect)
One of the reasons circus clowns terrify sensitive individuals is because their image triggers an instinctual response within us concerning a collective archetypal folk memory of the potential evil which might lay behind the painted-on smile. We know the smile of the circus clown is fake and that underneath the expression can be a malicious sneer.
Thomas Sheridan (Puzzling People: The Labyrinth of the Psychopath)
I don’t like social media, that’s all.” I shrug. “What’s not to like?” She keeps taking her own photo. I stare at her deadpan. “A misrepresentation of society with unrealistic images that portray a fake lifestyle with impossible ideals,
T.L. Swan (The Stopover (Miles High Club, #1))
The term POTUS used to be viewed around the world with a degree of respect. Unfortunately the current US president has junked any last remnant of that image. Instead he seems only too happy to trash the environment; to scrap age old alliances promoting peace and prosperity; to discard internationally binding treaties; to toss aside like garbage hard won civil liberties. Maybe DETRITUS is a more fitting acronym for the current occupant of the White House - 'Deranged egotistical tyrant ruining & isolating the U.S.
Alex Morritt (Lines & Lenses)
That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality. That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else. Except that in your desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you: "It's a mistake! They'll set things right!" And everything which is by now comprised in the traditional, even literary, image of an arrest will pile up and take shape, not in your own disordered memory, but in what your family and your neighbors in your apartment remember: The sharp nighttime ring or the rude knock at the door. The insolent entrance of the unwiped jackboots of the unsleeping State Security operatives. The frightened and cowed civilian witness at their backs. (And what function does this civilian witness serve? The victim doesn't even dare think about it and the operatives don't remember, but that's what the regulations call for, and so he has to sit there all night long and sign in the morning. 1 For the witness, jerked from his bed, it is torture too—to go out night after night to help arrest his own neighbors and acquaintances.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Abridged))
food became something to categorize—whole or processed, real or fake, clean or dirty—and to fear.
Virginia Sole-Smith (The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America)
An image of Ted Bundy with his arm in a fake cast asking Brenda Ball to help him carry his books to his car flashed across Patricia’s mind. She dismissed it as undignified.
Grady Hendrix (The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires)
As I picked up the pieces, it became apparent that she was a narcissist, who took pleasure in breaking down this beautiful self I built up with much care. A damaged and misguided empath, she used her emotional intelligence to manipulate those around her, living multiple lies and pumping up her fake public image. I can only hope that she heals and finds herself one day and that her victims survive her.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
[P]ower, terrible, unprecedented power, and with it came the unavoidable choice that had faced every power-junkie since time began: to have the sheer gall to fake being something greater than a man, or cop-out on the millions who had poured a part of themselves into your image and be something less.
Norman Spinrad (Bug Jack Barron)
they say that everything in the world is an illusion, that it’s not real. but how’s it an illusion? who’d say those real, material things right there in front of you are fake, right? the form that material things exist in is one way, while the form they manifest in, it turns out, is different. and our eyes have an ability: they can fix the material things in our material dimension so that they appear to be in the state we now see. but actually, that’s not their state. that’s not even their state in our dimension. for example, what does a human being look like under a microscope? his whole body is loose and made up of little molecules, just like grains of sand, and they’re granular and in motion, electrons are orbiting nuclei, the whole body is wriggling and in motion, and the surface of the body isn’t smooth, it’s irregular. the same goes for every material thing in the universe, be it steel, iron, stone, or whatever, all the molecular elements inside them are in motion. you really can’t see the overall form of it, and the truth is, none of those things are static. this table is wriggling too, but your eyes can’t see the reality of it. so this pair of eyes can give you a false image.
Li Hongzhi
You can fall in love with an image and you can forget whom this image really belongs to! You can look at the reflection and completely forget what is reflected! You can ignore the real and follow the unreal! But ultimately, your destination will not be where you want to arrive! You will only arrive in something fake!
Mehmet Murat ildan
So then, this image of a lukewarm man that Sonoko was now seeing, this thing that appeared to be my character, aroused my disgust, made my entire existence seem worthless, and tore my self-confidence into shreds. I was made to distrust both my will and my character, or at least, so far as my will was concerned, I could not believe it was anything but a fake.
Yukio Mishima (Confessions of a Mask)
The fact that Bernie stole the show at Biden’s inauguration, and that the image of him just sitting there instantly became an icon, indicates that the true world spirit of our time was there, in his lone figure, embodying skepticism about the fake normalization staged in the ceremony. The celebration of his image expressed that there is still hope for our cause; people are aware that radical change is needed.
Slavoj Žižek (Heaven in Disorder)
wallet card for people to keep in front of them during conversations like this one. One side of the card was solid red, with no words or images, and was meant to be displayed outward as a nonverbal signal that you disagreed and that you weren’t going to be drawn into a fake argument. The other side, facing the user, was a list of little reminders as to what was really going on: Speech is aggression Every utterance has a winner and a loser Curiosity is feigned Lying is performative Stupidity is power
Neal Stephenson (Fall; or, Dodge in Hell)
True spirituality is a thing of joy and of the earth, and has nothing to do with fake adult dignity. It has nothing to do with long words and sorrowful faces. It has to do with the dance of consciousness that is within you, and with the sense of spiritual adventure that is within your hearts. That is the meaning of spirituality; and as I have told you before, if I could I would do a merry dance about the room to show you that your vitality is not dependent upon a physical image. It is not dependent upon your youth, it is not dependent upon your body. It rings and sings through the universe, and through your entire personality. It is a sense of joy that makes all creativity probable. So do not think you are being spiritual when you are being long faced, and do not think you are being spiritual when you berate yourself for your sins. The seasons within your system come and go. The sun falls upon your face whether you think you are a sinner or a saint. The vitality of the universe is creativity and joy and love, and that is spirituality. And that is what I shall tell the readers of my book.
Seth Seth Speaks
Negative body image in adolescent girls is of growing concern in the modern society. As girls go through puberty, their bodies gain adipose and move farther away from the thin childish appearance. You simply need to take a look at a fashion magazine to see how the fake ideal feminine body represented in it is often asexual and childlike. Such a medium influences the girls and causes them to become dissatisfied with their natural appearance. And this leads to depression. Importantly, depression is a significant risk factor for substance abuse and suicide attempts.
Abhijit Naskar (The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality (Humanism Series))
The brutality of the regime knows no bounds. It does not remain neutral towards the people here; it creates beasts in its own image out of ordinary people who might have been neighbors instead. Even more dangerous was the fact that the fundamentals of humanity and the ABCs of life have been eviscerated from the hearts of many people here. State television destroys human compassion, the sort of fundamental empathy that is not contingent upon a political or even a cultural orientation, and through which one human being can relate to another. The al-Dunya channel stirs up hatred, broadcasts fake news and maligns any opposing viewpoint. I wasn't the only one subjected to internet attacks by the security services and the Ba'thists, even if the campaign against me may be fiercer because I come from the Alawite community and have a lot of family connections to them -- because I am a woman and it's supposedly easier to break me with rumors and character assassinations and insults. Some of my actress friends who expressed sympathy for the children of Dar'a and called for an end to the siege of the city were subjected to a campaign of character assassinations and called traitors, then forced to appear on state television in order to clarify their position. Friends who expressed sympathy for the families of the martyrs would get insulted, they would be called traitors and accused of being foreign spies. People became afraid to show even a little bit of sympathy for one another, going against the basic facts of life, the slightest element of what could be called the laws of human nature -- that is, if we indeed agree that sympathy is part of human nature in the first place. Moral and metaphorical murder is being carried out as part of a foolproof plan, idiotic but targeted, stupid yet leaving a mark on people's souls.
Samar Yazbek
Dragging ourselves through the slides of pseudo reality , I have seen (us) craving for that " fix". Glued to the small screens , Alike an "event horizon" , transporting us to other dimension , contemplating likes ! Obsessed with over cropped out images of our ex lovers lover, Self contemplating and filtered obsession , who is getting fat and who all broke their back , Look at my carefully orchestrated life! Ain't I clever ?‎?? Look ,how much fun I had in the party! .....look at how well liked I am .?! I want all my 5000 fake friends to know that this is what fun is and I swear, I am ,having a good time!!!
BinYamin Gulzar
Malcolm Muggeridge, once a keen British social and cultural critic who in his old age became something of a religious fanatic. While working on his own documentary on Mother Teresa for the BBC, aired in 1969, he felt he had experienced an authentic miracle: After filming footage in a dark residence called the House of the Dying, Muggeridge was astounded to discover, when later viewing the footage, that the images were in fact clearly visible. Muggeridge himself exclaimed: "It's divine light! It's Mother Teresa. You'll find that it's divine light, old boy" (MT 27). (I like that "old boy" remark-so distinctively British.) Unfortunately, Muggeridge's cameraman, Ken Macmillan, calmly pointed out that the effect was the result of a new kind of film created by Kodak. But Muggeridge's "miracle" had by this time already spread and is still being talked about. To Hitchens, however, the significance of the episode is very different: "It is the first unarguable refutation of a claimed miracle to come not merely from another supposed witness to said miracle but from its actual real-time author. As such, it deserves to be more widely known than it is" (MT 27). But, alas, the average person is far more inclined to believe in "miracles," however fake, than in the debunking of miracles, however real.
S.T. Joshi (The Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism)
The last week of shooting, we did a scene in which I drag Amanda Wyss, the sexy, blond actress who played Tina, across the ceiling of her bedroom, a sequence that ultimately became one of the most visceral from the entire Nightmare franchise. Tina’s bedroom was constructed as a revolving set, and before Tina and Freddy did their dance of death, Wes did a few POV shots of Nick Corri (aka Rod) staring at the ceiling in disbelief, then we flipped the room, and the floor became the ceiling and the ceiling became the floor and Amanda and I went to work. As was almost always the case when Freddy was chasing after a nubile young girl possessed by her nightmare, Amanda was clad only in her baby-doll nightie. Wes had a creative camera angle planned that he wanted to try, a POV shot from between Amanda’s legs. Amanda, however, wasn’t in the cameramen’s union and wouldn’t legally be allowed to operate the cemera for the shot. Fortunately, Amy Haitkin, our director of photography’s wife, was our film’s focus puller and a gifted camera operator in her own right. Being a good sport, she peeled off her jeans and volunteered to stand in for Amanda. The makeup crew dapped some fake blood onto her thighs, she lay down on the ground, Jacques handed her the camera, I grabbed her ankles, and Wes called, “Action.” After I dragged Amy across the floor/ceiling, I spontaneously blew her a kiss with my blood-covered claw; the fake blood on my blades was viscous, so that when I blew her my kiss of death, the blood webbed between my blades formed a bubble, a happy cinematic accident. The image of her pale, slender, blood-covered legs, Freddy looming over her, straddling the supine adolescent girl, knife fingers dripping, was surreal, erotic, and made for one of the most sexually charged shots of the movie. Unfortunately it got left on the cutting-room floor. If Wes had left it in, the MPAA - who always seemed to have it out for Mr. Craven - would definitely have tagged us with an X rating. You win some, you lose some.
Robert Englund (Hollywood Monster: A Walk Down Elm Street with the Man of Your Dreams)
After we eat of the Apple of Knowledge, however, all of us start to be aware of ourselves, and our consciousness starts to be divided from our being. We start to have an image of ourselves which blocks our true expression. How do we go from there? There are two ways of dealing with this situation. The first is to find a self-image one is comfortable with. This is what most people do. It has some advantages since it causes the mind to operate reasonably undisturbed and it brings some peace to most people. People who find and maintain a self-image they are comfortable with are generally known as ‘happy people’. It doesn’t mean a whole lot, because in fact this image they are comfortable with is completely fake. There is another road, the road of learning to get rid of all self-imagery. This is a hard road however and requires one to pretty much battle for the rest of ones life (which isn’t a bad thing at all since the sense and meaning of life are essentially to put up a good battle). One develops techniques to stop identifying with ones self-image. The more these mechanisms behind self-imagery are mastered the more easy it becomes to switch and correct ones identities. At some point we can simply get rid of the self-image and be reborn as the child we once were, but a different child who has the triumph of knowledge in his pocket.
Martijn Benders
Unfortunately, Zinn’s attack on the historians who gave students a balanced picture of Columbus has been remarkably effective. Zinn successfully sold himself as a historian knocking down the giants who preceded him and championed the cause of the innocents oppressed by colonizers, capitalists, and Christians. Images of unspeakable cruelty against a gentle people remain in the minds of countless students who have read Zinn’s propaganda, and they now color the public discussion about Columbus. As history education professor Sam Wineburg pointed out with no little amazement, Howard Zinn’s readers believe him. Michael Kazin has noted that Zinn’s History takes on “the force and authority of revelation.
Mary Grabar (Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America)
The main Stuxnet file was incredibly large—500 kilobytes, as opposed to the 10 to 15 KB they usually saw. Even Conficker, the monster worm that infected more than 6 million machines the previous two years, was only 35 kilobytes in size. Any malware larger than this usually just contained a space-hogging image file that accounted for its bloat—such as a fake online banking page that popped up in the browser of infected machines to trick victims into relinquishing their banking credentials. But there was no image file in Stuxnet, and no extraneous fat, either. And, as O’Murchu began to take the files apart, he realized the code was also much more complex than he or anyone else had previously believed. When
Kim Zetter (Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon)
On social media, everyone can invent a new image for themselves. They can create a mask and work on perfecting it every day. Everyone becomes their own brand to exist in the eyes of others— a delusional world. The detachment? Vanity. Unhappy souls wanting to be accepted. Why go to the extremes? Why must anyone try to be what they’re not? I call it “digital happiness.” Digital happiness is an invention. The idea behind this display is miserable people who often want you to love them behind the mask. So, you can post the (fake) lies and be loved by even thousands that are going through this delusion. If you post the real, you’ll be ridiculed and questioned because “reality” is out of this equation, and the mask is an order.
Henry
In every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual "taste"... [is] produce[d by the devil and his angels]. This they do bu working through the small circle of artists, dressmakers, actresses, and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus [they] have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females-and there is more in that than you might suppose. As regards the male taste [they] have varied a good deal. At one time [they] have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men's vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, [they] have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present [they] are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and [they] now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, [they] thus aggravate the female's chronic horror of growing old (with many [successful] results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. [They] have engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, or course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them to appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being "frank" and "healthy" and getting back to nature. As a result [they] are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist-making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible.
C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
The non-event is not when nothing happens. It is, rather, the realm of perpetual change, of a ceaseless updating, of an incessant succession in real time, which produces this general equivalence, this indifference, this banality that characterizes the zero degree of the event. A perpetual escalation that is also the escalation of growth - or of fashion, which is pre-eminently the field of compulsive change and built-in obsolescence. The ascendancy of models gives rise to a culture of difference that puts an end to any historical continuity. Instead of unfolding as part of a history, things have begun to succeed each other in the void. A profusion of language and images before which we are defenceless, reduced to the same powerlessness, to the same paralysis as we might show on the approach of war. It isn't a question of disinformation or brainwashing. It was a naIve error on the part of the FBI to attempt to create a Disinformation Agency for purposes of managed manipulation - a wholly useless undertaking, since disinformation comes from the very profusion of information, from its incantation, its looped repetition, which creates an empty perceptual field, a space shattered as though by a neutron bomb or by one of those devices that sucks in all the oxygen from the area of impact. It's a space where everything is pre-neutralized, including war, by the precession of images and commentaries, but this is perhaps because there is at bottom nothing to say about something that unfolds, like this war, to a relentless scenario, without a glimmer of uncertainty regarding the final outcome.
Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Talking Images))
As if all the stories of the contamination of the scientific literature, the waste, the corrosive effect on trust and even the deaths aren’t bad enough, here’s that terrifying thought again: these are just the ones we know about. Could it be that the fraudsters we haven’t caught are smarter, more cunning and more dangerous than any of those covered in this chapter? Many scientific fraudsters, after all, are exposed not by data sleuths or by scanning papers for faked images, but by whistleblowers who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to spot something suspect. It’s overwhelmingly likely that some fraudsters exist who have evaded such detection, who have concealed their misdeeds more effectively and produced fake science that doesn’t raise any questions. It’s entirely possible that we’ll never find them.
Stuart Ritchie (Science Fictions)
Surely a one-and-a-half-year-old infant was unable to grasp what it meant for a man who was not his father to be sucking his mother’s breasts. That much was clear. So if this memory of Tengo’s was genuine, the scene must have been seared into his retinas as a pure image free of judgment—the way a camera records objects on film, mechanically, as a blend of light and shadow. And as his consciousness matured, the fixed image held in reserve would have been analyzed bit by bit, and meaning applied to it. But is such a thing even possible? Was the infant brain capable of preserving images like that? Or was this simply a false memory of Tengo’s? Was it just something that his mind had later decided—for whatever purpose or plan—to make up on its own? Tengo had given plenty of thought to the possibility that this memory might be a fabrication, but he had arrived at the conclusion that it probably was not. It was too vivid and too deeply compelling to be fake. The light, the smells, the beating of his heart: these felt overwhelmingly real, not like imitations. And besides, it explained many things—both logically and emotionally—to assume that the scene was real.
Haruki Murakami (1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3))
My dear readers, I find myself perplexed by the phantoms that now inhabit our veins and perpetually whisper in our ears. These specters are always watching, their formless eyes casting judgement upon our every thought and action. They stalk us behind screens and within circuits, gathering each tidbit we release into the ether to build their ever-growing profiles of our souls. Through these ghastly portals, our lives have become performance. Each waking moment an opportunity to curate our images and broadcast our cleverness. Nuance has fled in favor of hashtag and like, while meaning has been diced into 280 characters or less. Substance is sacrificed at the altar of shareability, as we optimize each motive and emotion to become more digestible digital content. Authenticity now lives only in offline obscurity, while our online avatars march on endlessly, seeking validation through numbers rather than depth. What secrets remain unshared on these platforms of glass? What mysteries stay concealed behind profiles and pose? Have we traded intimacy for influence, and true understanding for audience engagement? I fear these shadow networks breed narcissism and foster loneliness, masked as connection. That the sum of a life’s joys and sorrows can now be reduced to a reel of carefully selected snippets says little of the richness that once was. So follow the phantoms that stalk you if you will, but do not forget that which still breathes beneath the screens. There you will find humanity, flawed but whole, beautiful in its imperfection and trajectory undefined by likes or loves. The lanterns may flicker and fade, but the darkness that remains has always held truth. Look deeper than the glow, and know that which can never be shared or measured, only felt. In mystery, Your friend, Edgar Allan Poe (Poe talking about social media)
Edgar Allan Poe
To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called "good prose style." On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose--not simply accept--the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally.
George Orwell (All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
Godly grief readily confesses. After seeing your sin, and sorrowing over your sin, the worst thing you can do is to try stuffing your sin, hoping nobody ever finds out who you really are. Turns out, the best way to avoid being found out a fake is just not to be one—to be open with people about your struggles, while being equally as open in your praise of God for what He’s making of you, despite your many messes and problems. This is where the church comes in so beautifully, because it gets us around people who can help us carry the nagging issues of our hearts—people to whom we can confess our battles with sin and confess our need for a Savior—while we’re doing the same for them. When the only person that truly knows all about us is the person who uses our hairbrush, we are easy pickings for the Enemy, ripe for being outmaneuvered and outsmarted. That’s how we remain slaves to our repeated failures, by basically resisting the redeeming love of God and the needed, encouraging support of others. Because even if we’re as much as 99 percent known (or much less, as is more often the case) to our spouse, our friends, our family, and the people around us, we are still not fully known. We’re still hiding out. We’re still covering up. We don’t want them to know everything. But true sorrow over sin begs to be vented—both vertically to God and horizontally to others. So mark this down: You have no shot at experiencing real change in life if you’re habitually protecting your image, hyping your spiritual brand, and putting out the vibe that you’re a lot more unfazed by temptation than the reality you know and live would suggest. Even Satan himself cannot succeed at clobbering you with condemnation when the stuff he’s accusing you of doing is the same stuff you’ve been honestly admitting before God and others and trusting the Lord for His help with. That’s some of the best action you can take against the sin in your life. That’s responsible repentance.
Matt Chandler (Recovering Redemption: A Gospel Saturated Perspective on How to Change)
A new form of lying has emerged in recent times. This is what Arendt calls “image-making,” where factual truth is dismissed if it doesn’t fit the image. The image becomes a substitute for reality. All such lies harbor an element of violence: organized lying always tends to destroy whatever it has decided to negate. The difference between the traditional political lie and the modern lie is the difference between hiding something and destroying it. We have recently seen how fabricated images can become a reality for millions of people, including the image-maker himself. We have witnessed this in the 2016 American presidential election. Despite the obvious falsity of his claims, the president insists that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest in history; despite the fact that he did not receive a majority of votes, he insists that this was because millions of fraudulent votes were cast; and despite the evidence that Russians interfered with the presidential election, the president claims that the “suggestion” that there was Russian interference is just a devious way of calling his legitimacy into question. The real danger here is that an image is created that loyal followers want to believe regardless of what is factually true. They are encouraged to dismiss anything that conflicts with the image as “fake news” or the conspiracy of elites who want to fool them. What Arendt wrote more than a half a century ago might have been written yesterday. “Contemporary history is full of instances in which tellers of factual truth were felt to be more dangerous, and even more hostile, than the real opponents” (Arendt 1977: 255). Arendt was not sanguine that tellers of factual truth would triumph over image-makers. Factual truth-telling is frequently powerless against image-making and can be defeated in a head-on clash with the powers that be. Nevertheless, she did think that ultimately factual truth has a stubborn power of its own. Image-makers know this, and that is why they seek to discredit a free press and institutions where there is a pursuit of impartial truth.
Richard J. Bernstein (Why Read Hannah Arendt Now?)
Obama is also directing the U.S. government to invest billions of dollars in solar and wind energy. In addition, he is using bailout leverage to compel the Detroit auto companies to build small, “green” cars, even though no one in the government has investigated whether consumers are interested in buying small, “green” cars—the Obama administration just believes they should. All these measures, Obama recognizes, are expensive. The cap and trade legislation is estimated to impose an $850 billion burden on the private sector; together with other related measures, the environmental tab will exceed $1 trillion. This would undoubtedly impose a significant financial burden on an already-stressed economy. These measures are billed as necessary to combat global warming. Yet no one really knows if the globe is warming significantly or not, and no one really knows if human beings are the cause of the warming or not. For years people went along with Al Gore’s claim that “the earth has a fever,” a claim illustrated by misleading images of glaciers disappearing, oceans swelling, famines arising, and skies darkening. Apocalypse now! Now we know that the main body of data that provided the basis for these claims appears to have been faked. The Climategate scandal showed that scientists associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were quite willing to manipulate and even suppress data that did not conform to their ideological commitment to global warming.3 The fakers insist that even if you discount the fakery, the data still show.... But who’s in the mood to listen to them now? Independent scientists who have reviewed the facts say that average global temperatures have risen by around 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years. Lots of things could have caused that. Besides, if you project further back, the record shows quite a bit of variation: periods of warming, followed by periods of cooling. There was a Medieval Warm Period around 1000 A.D., and a Little Ice Age that occurred several hundred years later. In the past century, the earth warmed slightly from 1900 to 1940, then cooled slightly until the late 1970s, and has resumed warming slightly since then. How about in the past decade or so? Well, if you count from 1998, the earth has cooled in the past dozen years. But the statistic is misleading, since 1998 was an especially hot year. If you count from 1999, the earth has warmed in the intervening period. This statistic is equally misleading, because 1999 was a cool year. This doesn’t mean that temperature change is in the eye of the beholder. It means, in the words of Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, that “all this temperature variability on a wide range of time scales reveals that just about the only thing constant in climate is change.”4
Dinesh D'Souza (The Roots of Obama's Rage)
As their uncle, Earl Spencer, says their characters are very different from the public image. “The press have always written up William as the terror and Harry as a rather quiet second son. In fact William is a very self-possessed, intelligent and mature boy and quite shy. He is quite formal and stiff, sounding older than his years when he answers the phone.” It is Harry who is the mischievous imp of the family. Harry’s puckish character manifested itself to his uncle during the return flight from Necker, the Caribbean island owned by Virgin airline boss Richard Branson. He recalls: “Harry was presented with his breakfast. He had his headphones on and a computer game in front of him but he was determined to eat his croissant. It took him about five minutes to manoeuvre all his electronic gear, his knife, his croissant and his butter. When he eventually managed to get a mouthful there was a look of such complete satisfaction on his face. It was a really wonderful moment.” His godparent Carolyn Bartholomew says, without an ounce of prejudice, that Harry is “the most affectionate, demonstrative and huggable little boy” while William is very much like his mother, “intuitive, switched on and highly perceptive.” At first she thought the future king was a “little terror.” “He was naughty and had tantrums,” she recalls. “But when I had my two children I realized that they are all like that at some point. In fact William is kind-hearted, very much like Diana. He would give you his last Rolo sweet. In fact he did on one occasion. He was longing for this sweet, he only had one left and he gave it to me.” Further evidence of his generous heart occurred when he gathered together all his pocket money, which only amounted to a few pence, and solemnly handed it over to her. But he is no angel as Carolyn saw when she visited Highgrove. Diana had just finished a swim in the open air pool and had changed into a white toweling dressing gown as she waited for William to follow her. Instead he splashed about as though he were drowning and slowly sank to the bottom. His mother, not knowing whether it was a fake or not, struggled to get out of her robe. Then, realizing the urgency, she dived in still in her dressing gown. At that moment he resurfaced, shouting and laughing at the success of his ruse. Diana was not amused. Generally William is a youngster who displays qualities of responsibility and thoughtfulness beyond his years and enjoys a close rapport with his younger brother whom friends believe will make an admirable adviser behind the scenes when William eventually becomes king. Diana feels that it is a sign that in some way they will share the burdens of monarchy in the years to come. Her approach is conditioned by her firmly held belief that she will never become queen and that her husband will never become King Charles III.
Andrew Morton (Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words)
These things are bad for you: sex, high-rise buildings, chocolate, lack of exercise, dictatorship, racism! No, au contraire! Celibacy damages the brain, high-rise buildings bring us closer to God, tests show that a bar of chocolate a day significantly improves chilren's academic performance, exercise kills, tyranny is just a part of our culture so I'll thank you to keep your cultural-imperialist ideas off my fucking fiefdom, and as for racism, let's not get all preachy about this, it's better out in the open than under some grubby carpet. That extremist is a moderate! That universal right is culturally specific! This circumcised woman is culturally happy! That Aboriginal whistlecockery is culturally barbaric! Pictures don't lie! This image has been faked! Free the press! Ban nosy Journalists! The novel is dead! Honor is dead! God is dead! Aargh, they're all alive and they're coming after us! That star is rising! No, she's falling! We dined at nine! We dined at eight! You were on time! No, you were late! East is West! Up is down! Yes is No! In is Out! Lies are Truth! Hate is Love! Two and two makes five! And everything is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.
Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)
purity-versus-disgust messaging, Willer says, he and Feinberg did something similar. They spoke in conservative language, making a fake environmental advertisement that essentially said, “Now more than ever, it’s so important to protect our sacred mountains and our rivers from desecration.” The ad also talked about impurities in the environment entering our bodies. It had images of people drinking dirty water. “What really surprised us was that it closed the gap between liberals and conservatives,” Willer says.
Shawn Lawrence Otto (the war on Science)
You lost.” “I know.” “Drop to your knees.” “Why don’t you make this interesting,” he gritted out, “and take off your pants?” His words supplied an image of him kneeling between my naked legs. I stopped a shiver before it could form. My brows winged up. “You reneging?” Very slowly, he eased to his feet, inching his big body higher and higher. I gave my cuticles my attention. I heard his teeth grind together, even thought I heard his jawbone crack. I flicked him an insouciant glance and patted my mouth to smother a fake yawn. That murderous gleam had branched from his eyes and now consumed his expression. His black clothes rustled as he moved to his knees. I studied my cuticles again, waiting, my breath suspended, the casual pretense the only thing keeping me from gaping. “You did a…good job,” he ground out.
Gena Showalter (Enslave Me Sweetly (Alien Huntress, #2))
It's enough for me... I saw the image ... We were together We were friends We were in relationship ... Memories are enough... ... THAT ARE FAKE ONE... it happens just once or twice sometimes...
Deyth Banger (All As None and More (Deeper Level Drop #Collection))
Last night. I, uh, I spoke with someone who off-handedly told me you knew we had a fake engagement. I couldn’t possibly understand how you’d know, so I blamed Lottie, thinking she was the one who let it slip to Ellie. I said some shitty things, and she left.” I shake my head, completely disgusted with myself. “I fucking blew it because I was so caught up in my image, my reputation, that I forgot one thing—none of that matters if I don’t have someone to share my life with. She took off for her sister’s.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “She chose sleeping on the floor over sleeping with me. If that doesn’t tell you how fucked I am, I don’t know what does.
Meghan Quinn (A Not So Meet Cute (Cane Brothers, #1))
Here, in the realm of three-dimensional wax, the mirror is painted. The only credible reasons are symbolic. Confronting an instance where Art played consciously with Illusion and admitted the vanity of images through the image of an image, the industry of the Absolute Fake didn’t dare venture to copy, because it would have come too close to the revelation of its own falsehood.
Umberto Eco (Travels In Hyperreality (Harvest Book))
In order to construct a flawless imitation, the first step was to gather as much video data as possible with a web crawler. His ideal targets were fashionable Yoruba girls, with their brightly colored V-neck buba and iro that wrapped around their waists, hair bundled up in gele. Preferably, their videos were taken in their bedrooms with bright, stable lighting, their expressions vivid and exaggerated, so that AI could extract as many still-frame images as possible. The object data set was paired with another set of Amaka’s own face under different lighting, from multiple angles and with alternative expressions, automatically generated by his smartstream. Then, he uploaded both data sets to the cloud and got to work with a hyper-generative adversarial network. A few hours or days later, the result was a DeepMask model. By applying this “mask,” woven from algorithms, to videos, he could become the girl he had created from bits, and to the naked eye, his fake was indistinguishable from the real thing. If his Internet speed allowed, he could also swap faces in real time to spice up the fun. Of course, more fun meant more work. For real-time deception to work, he had to simultaneously translate English or Igbo into Yoruba, and use transVoice to imitate the voice of a Yoruba girl and a lip sync open-source toolkit to generate corresponding lip movement. If the person on the other end of the chat had paid for a high-quality anti-fake detector, however, the app might automatically detect anomalies in the video, marking them with red translucent square warnings
Kai-Fu Lee (AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future)
Behind the poster wall a ferocious battle was happening in the cloud, in utter silence. The two sides were GAN’s positive and negative poles, the detective network and the forger network. The goal of the forger network was to retrain and upgrade itself to generate more realistic images that could fool the anti-fake detectors, based on feedback from the detective network, in order to minimize the loss function value of the generated image. Conversely, the detective network strived to maximize the loss function value. This contest, with the stakes rising every millisecond, would repeat itself millions of times until both sides reached a certain balance.
Kai-Fu Lee (AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future)
missed drinking. I missed talking with friends, the late nights, snorting things, fucking people. Then as if a slide in the darkened room of art history class, the bright-red image of Hailey’s body in a room of fake blood flashed.
Calla Henkel (Other People’s Clothes)
Yes, such narrow-minded people are there, who like to hurt others by the flirt, ugly words, and fake images, but their destiny is empty of life and love; they remain broken forever.
Ehsan Sehgal
consultant in order to secure the desired property. “She thinks I’m too unapproachable. That I need to soften up and or get laid.” Marcus grinned. “That’s my kind of consultant. Think she’d go for someone like me?” “No.” Gage braced himself for Haddie Madison, the fifty-year-old image consultant he'd hired out of desperation. Pasting on his most congenial face, he greeted her with a forced smile. "What brings you out to the job site, Ms. Madison?" Her brows twisted. "Wow. That's the best you can do? I can see straight through that pathetic attempt at pleasantries. And, please, call me Haddie." Gage abandoned the fake smile. "Haddie. What are you doing here?" "You said you had a meeting with Mr. Langley today, in ten minutes, if I'm not mistaken." "Eight." She nodded. "I'm here for moral support and to observe your interaction with the man." Marcus coughed to hide his snort of laughter. Gage glared at him. "Get your crew busy on something, even if it's only cleaning up the work site." Marcus let loose his grin and clapped a hand to Gage's back, nearly knocking him over. "And that's why you're paid the big bucks, my friend." The site foreman strolled away whistling. Not a care in the
Elle James (The Billionaire Cinderella Test (Billionaire Online Dating #2))
Imperfect ways I shall walk with, before I ever walk with a fake image just to get this world’s approval of me. -MillYentei⋆
Deshawn Yeldell
Breathe. Calm. Zen. Feel the Force. It’s a mantra I’ve used a lot over the years, usually accompanied by images of clean, clear waterfalls washing away all the social anxiety and leaving me the picture of poise, lightsaber in one hand, standing in a badass pose.
Louisa Masters (Fake It 'Til You Make It)
I don’t like social media, that’s all.” I shrug. “What’s not to like?” She keeps taking her own photo. I stare at her deadpan. “A misrepresentation of society with unrealistic images that portray a fake lifestyle with impossible ideals,” I reply as I sip my wine. Don’t piss me off, bitch.
T.L. Swan (The Stopover (Miles High Club, #1))
It used to be said that a picture is worth a thousand words; however today, in journalism and across social media, a picture is worth a thousand out-of-context speculations.
Criss Jami
There is no Card. He’s playing a trick. “There is no color,” I said. “There can’t be a Card.” “I assure you there is.” I ripped the blindfold from my face, a small gasp escaping my lips as I stared at the image of ancient trees bound together by forest-green velvet. The Twin Alders Card. The Nightmare and I realized the truth at the same moment. A laugh rippled in my throat. “There’s no magic,” I said. “Just paper and velvet. It’s a fake.” Ravyn smiled, a shadow shifting along his striking nose. “Are you sure?” “Positive, Captain.” When he pocketed the false Card, the others flickered and jostled. I caught a glance of the familiar burgundy light in the cluster of colors and narrowed my gaze. “There’s a lot of talk about the two Nightmare Cards,” I said, my tone sharp. “But no one seems to know that the King already has one. Or that his Captain uses it so freely.
Rachel Gillig (One Dark Window (The Shepherd King, #1))
On the morning of September 11, 2014, the thirteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, residents of Saint Mary Parish, Louisiana, began receiving texts stating that a chemical fire was underway and that they should take shelter from toxic fumes. The original messages said to check the website “columbiachemical.com” for information. At around the same time, hundreds of Twitter accounts tweeted that a disaster was unfolding in real time. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” someone using the name of Jon Merritt wrote. A search for that same hashtag revealed multiple eyewitness accounts of the explosion and fire. There were photos of flames and videos of surveillance footage from a nearby gas station showing the initial flash of the conflagration; there were images of plumes of black smoke rising skyward over what appeared to be the Louisiana bayou. One Twitter account posted a screenshot of CNN’s landing page, appearing to show that the explosion was now national news and that, to commemorate the 9/11 attacks, ISIS had taken responsibility. It was, according to a flurry of contemporaneous accounts, the latest terrorist attack on the US homeland. But it was all fake. The IRA, in far-off Saint Petersburg, had made it all up—the alerts, the photographs, the eyewitness accounts.III Why did they do it? Perhaps it was just to prove they could and to sow whatever panic that followed. Or maybe they were practicing.
Aaron Zebley (Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia, and the Mueller Investigation)
At the same time, it is important to remember that nostalgia for lower-tech times is based on fake memories. This is as true in the small scale of centuries as it is in the vast scale of life. Every genetic feature of you, from the crook of the corner of your eye to much of the way your body moves when you listen to music, was framed and formed by the negative spaces carved out by the pre-reproductive deaths of your would-be ancestors over hundreds of millions years. You are the reverse image of inconceivable epochs of heartbreak and cruelty. Your would-be ancestors in their many species, reaching back into the phylogenetic tree, were eaten, often by diseases, or sexually rejected before they could contribute genes to your legacy. The genetic, natural part of you is the sum of the leftovers of billions of years of extreme violence and poverty. Modernity is precisely the way individuals arose out of the ravages of evolutionary selection.
Jaron Lanier
The writing part is always the hardest part of filmmaking. Almost anyone can direct—they won’t necessarily direct well, but the machinery works—you can take someone off the street and put them with an experienced crew and the movie will get made. But writing can’t be faked. It doesn’t run itself. It has to be worked out very specifically, word for word, image for image.
J.W. Rinzler (The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition))
No one really cares what you look like." I'm such a hypocrite, I think, and pull my shirt up over my head. I want it to be true so I decide to act like it is. If a pretty thin girl can be self-conscious about people looking at her in a bathing suit, then maybe the problem isn't what other people think so much as what we think of ourselves.
Eda J. Vor (Like Two Opposite Things)
Andy’s Message Around the time I received Arius’ email, Andy’s message arrived. He wrote: Young, I do remember Rick Samuels. I was at the seminar in the Bahriji when he came to lecture. Like you I was at once mesmerized by his style and beauty, which of course was a false image manufactured by the advertising agencies and sales promoters. I was surprised to hear your backroom story of him being gangbanged in the dungeon. We are not ones to judge since both of us had been down that negative road of self-loathing. This seems to be a common thread with people whom others considered good-looking or beautiful. In my opinion, it’s a fake image that handsome people know they cannot live up to. Instead of exterior beauty being an asset, it often becomes a psychological burden. During the years when I was with Toby, I delved in some fashion modeling work in New Zealand. I ventured into this business because it was my subconscious way of reminding me of the days we posed for Mario and Aziz. It was also my twisted way of hoping to meet another person like me, with the hope of building a loving long-term relationship. It was also a desperate attempt to break loose from Toby’s psychosomatic grip on my person. Ian was his name and he was a very attractive 24 year old architecture student. He modeled to earn some extra spending money. We became fast friends, but he had this foreboding nature which often came on unexpectedly. A sentence or a word could trigger his depression, sending the otherwise cheerful man into bouts of non-verbal communication. It was like a brightly lit light bulb suddenly being switched off in mid-sentence. We did have an affair while I was trying to patch things up with Toby. As delightful as our sexual liaisons were there was a hidden missing element, YOU! Much like my liaisons with Oscar, without your presence, our sexual communications took on a different dynamic which only you as the missing link could resolve. There were times during or after sex when Ian would abuse himself with negative thoughts and self-denigration. I tried to console him, yet I was deeply sorrowed about my own unresolved issues with Toby. It was like the blind leading the blind. I was gravely saddened when Ian took his own life. Heavily drugged on prescriptive anti-depressant and a stomach full of extensive alcohol consumption, he fell off his ten story apartment building. He died instantly. This was the straw that threw me into a nervous breakdown. Thank God I climbed out of my despondencies with the help of Ari and Aria. My dearest Young, I have a confession to make; you are the only person I have truly loved and will continue to love. All these years I’ve tried to forget you but I cannot. That said I am not trying to pry you away from Walter and have you return to me. We are just getting to know each other yet I feel your spirit has never left. Please make sure that Walter understands that I’m not jeopardizing your wonderful relationship. I am happy for the both of you. You had asked jokingly if I was interested in a triplet relationship. Maybe when the time and opportunity arises it may happen, but now I’m enjoying my own company after Albert’s passing. In a way it is nice to have my freedom after 8 years of building a life with Albert. I love you my darling boy and always will. As always, I await your cheerful emails. Andy. Xoxoxo
Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
the image of them trapped in that car haunted him, because now he knew them. They weren’t strangers anymore. They were so much more. He’d just spent the best night of his life with Grace. All he knew was that right now, he was going to enjoy this. His time with her and her son.
Victoria James (The Doctor's Fake Fiancee (Red River, #3))
Every time I turned around, there was a mirror image of whatever I was doing, but with a neat mustache and a perfect haircut. Worse than that, every now and then I would turn and see him simply staring at me, with an otherworldly expression of abstract longing on his face that I could not decipher. The days wore on and his presence became more and more exasperating. It was bad enough to have him following, watching, copying me—but even setting all that aside, I found it impossible to like Robert Chase. I admit that I rarely manage to achieve the kind of warm personal bond that humans routinely forge, mostly because I do not actually have human feelings. Even so, I fake it very well; I have survived among people my whole life and I know all of the rituals and tricks of social bonding. None of them worked with Chase, and for some reason I found myself reluctant to keep trying. Something about him was wrong, slightly off, unattractive, and although I could not have said why, I just didn’t like him.
Jeff Lindsay (Dexter's Final Cut (Dexter, #7))
Essential feminism suggests anger, humorlessness, militancy, unwavering principles, and a prescribed set of rules for how to be a proper feminist woman, or at least a proper white, heterosexual feminist woman—hate pornography, unilaterally decry the objectification of women, don’t cater to the male gaze, hate men, hate sex, focus on career, don’t shave. I kid, mostly, with that last one. This is nowhere near an accurate description of feminism, but the movement has been warped by misperception for so long that even people who should know better have bought into this essential image of feminism. Consider Elizabeth Wurtzel, who, in a June 2012 Atlantic article, says, “Real feminists earn a living, have money and means of their own.” By Wurtzel’s thinking, women who don’t “earn a living, have money and means of their own,” are fake feminists, undeserving of the label, a disappointment to the sisterhood. She takes the idea of essential feminism even further in a September 2012 Harper’s Bazaar article, where she suggests that a good feminist works hard to be beautiful. She says, “Looking great is a matter of feminism. No liberated woman would misrepresent the cause by appearing less than hale and happy.” It’s too easy to dissect the error of such thinking. She is suggesting that a woman’s worth is, in part, determined by her beauty, which is one of the very things feminism works against. The most significant problem with essential feminism is how it doesn’t allow for the complexities of human experience or individuality. There seems to be little room for multiple or discordant points of view. Essential feminism has, for example, led to the rise of the phrase “sex-positive feminism,” which creates a clear distinction between feminists who are positive about sex and feminists who aren’t—which, in turn, creates a self-fulfilling essentialist prophecy.
Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist: Essays)
It's enough for me... I saw the image ... We were together We were friends We were in relationship ... Memories are enough... ... THAT THEY ARE FAKE ONE... it happens just once or twice sometimes...
Deyth Banger
Yes, such narrow-minded people are there who like to hurt others with flirts, ugly words, and fake images. Their destiny is empty of life and love; they remain broken forever.
Ehsan Sehgal
This other Alice, this Wonderland Alice, on the other side of the glass, was someone very different. She had dark hair, for one; stringy, long, unkempt. The rest of her features were hard to distinguish because a thick, ratty white blindfold was tied around her head. Streaked and streaming down her cheeks from beneath it was thick black blood. Her lips were cracked and also bleeding, her bare neck and shoulders smudged with dirt. Alice swallowed. She had never seen anything like it. Even at the theater the blood was bright red and flowed easily and didn't cake up so. This was not a tableau; this was not fake blood. It was all too real- like something out of a scene of war, of a horror story, of a nightmare worse than any Alice ever had. And then the picture moved. Suddenly the other Alice was either screaming or grinning- impossible to tell which with her teeth outlined in more blood, her lips pulled away from them. She was holding up a banner that was delicately penned despite the poverty of her apparent surroundings. MERRY UNBIRTHDAY
Liz Braswell (Unbirthday)
And you’re right. The self-care culture has gotten out of control. Now people are told they need to buy certain things or look a certain way, live a certain way, to be happy, to be healthy.” I pause. “And it’s totally backfired, spiraled into something totally antithetical to self-care, actually. Now women are just competing with other women on social media. We present this bullshit, fake image of perfection to the world, but it’s totally unattainable. And it’s dangerous
Julia Spiro (Full)
Fake Plastic Trees” by Radiohead. Everett just wanted to hear the last verse. He could circle the block one more time. Ever since he’d gotten the call, he’d been numb, his chest so frozen that he could barely breathe. His adoptive brothers,
Harmony Reed (Spitting Image)
These public outings,” Paul commented, scribbling furiously on his legal pad. “What qualifies as ‘public’? My client has purposely cultivated a private image. If he starts showing up at the opening of every bottle in town, it’ll attract the wrong kind of attention. People won’t buy it.
Ava Wilder (How to Fake it in Hollywood)
A misrepresentation of society with unrealistic images that portray a fake lifestyle with impossible ideals,
T.L. Swan (The Stopover (Miles High Club, #1))
Churchill was obsessed with popular opinion and what we nowadays call “optics”. Image was everything and on his long path of self-promotion, no publicity stunt was to be missed. He often got it wrong.
Otto English (Fake History: Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped the World)
Don't make life an illusion filled with fake, perceived, and ignorant self. Go out see the world as it is so you will see that it is not what you think it is, as you grow you will see that people have perceived your image, limited you with what they think you are not with what you actually are. don't worry it's the role you are assumed in their life but remember in your life you are the one who you are so arise, awake and conquer.
Aiyaz Uddin (Science Behind A Perfect Life)
One of the first lessons of marijuana: the world contains too many information bytes to fit into any one model. The second lesson: any model you create changes perceived information bytes until they fit it. Viewed through the eyes of paranoia, your best friend appears part of a conspiracy against you. Viewed through the eyes of a Shakespearean humanist like Orson Welles, a Hank Quinlan becomes, not just a redneck racist pig, but an enlarged and tormented image of the flaws in all of us. And this uniquely noir case of film noir also reminds us that fake evidence may support a true thesis: a paradox to ponder . . .
Robert Anton Wilson (Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death)
Archer handed me his phone by way of explanation. It took me a minute to work out what I was looking at, then I recognized it as an assortment of trash all laid out on a table. I flipped to the next image and found a close-up of a crumpled receipt. My eyes scanned the details, then I swallowed heavily. "Is this..." My voice cracked, my fear getting the better of me. "Where was this found?
Tate James (Fake (Madison Kate, #3))
I crossed over to the window, staring out at the electronic billboard on the building directly across the intersection. It was me. Giant me. In nothing but a skimpy black corset, thong, and heels, leaning on a bar and looking every inch the sex kitten. Beside me was a bottle of vodka that I didn't remember being there in the photoshoot. The image pixelated out, only to be replaced by an even sexier one of both Archer and I. I was in his lap, our eyes locked and our lips just a fraction away from a kiss. On the table in front of us was that same vodka and a martini.
Tate James (Fake (Madison Kate, #3))