Fuzzy Picture Quotes

To lead any way other than by example, we send a fuzzy picture of leadership to others. If we work on improving ourselves first and make that our primary mission, then others are more likely to follow.

A month later Billie sits at her dining room table, sifting through the pictorial record of Chris's final days. It is all she can do to force herself to examine the fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow." - describing the mother of Chris McCandless after learning of his starvation in the wild

Fuzzy thinking can never be proven wrong. And only when we are proven wrong so clearly that we can no longer deny it to ourselves will we adjust our mental models of the world—producing a clearer picture of reality. Forecast, measure, revise: it is the surest path to seeing better.

He goes to start the car for me again, leaning so close his breath tickles my neck. My head goes fuzzy as I picture him closing the distance between our bodies, forgetting I'm supposed to be doing something. His lips form words, but I don't hear them. His scent is intoxicating, pulling me under. Holy crap! I'm going to pass out!

When friends couldn't be found, the books were always waiting with something new to tell. Life that was getting too much the same could be shaken up in a few minutes by the pictures in a book of some ancient temple newly discovered deep in a rain-forest, a fuzzy photo of Uranus with it's up-and-down rings, or a prismed picture taken through the faceted eye of a bee.

When friends couldn't be found, the books were always waiting with something new to tell. Life that was getting too much the same could be shaken up in a few minutes by the pictures in a book of some ancient temple newly discovered deep in a rain-forest, a fuzzy photo of Uranus with it's up-and-down rings, or a prismed picture taken through the faceted eye of a bee. -Nita Callahan- -So You Want To Be A Wizard-

the blue butterfly fluttered across her range of vision to land on the head of a butter yellow dandelion in Emma’s bouquet. The surprise and pleasure struck the three faces in that triangle under the white roses almost as one. Mac pressed the shutter. She knew, knew, the photograph wouldn’t be blurry and dark or fuzzy and washed out. Her thumb wouldn’t be blocking the lens. She knew exactly what the picture would look like, knew her grandmother had been wrong after all. Maybe happy ever after was bull, but she knew she wanted to take more pictures of moments that were happy. Because then they were ever after.

I sat down on a couch and closed my eyes and pictured myself. I couldn't see anything clearly. Wonderful! That's how it should be! I am a blurry image constantly trying to come into focus, and just when, for an instant, I have myself in perfectly clarity, I appear as a figure in my own background, fuzzy as hair on a peach

Getting your child to sleep becomes such a blinding obsession, I myself would often lose sight of the bigger picture: What is the actual goal here? Constant sleep? No awake time? Zero consciousness? I mean, we must accept that at some point babies have to be awake. They didn’t come to the planet just to sleep. “Are we determined to get them asleep just so we can get a taste of what life was like before we had kids? Because if we are, then tell me again—why did we have a kid? Just to lie there and look soft and fuzzy? We could have just gotten, say, a peach. A St. Bernard. A narcoleptic houseguest. Or why not just get a huge chenille bathrobe? Chenille bathrobes are fuzzy and just lie there—why don’t we just get us one of those and name it Michael?

In contrast, those of us who have moved on many times develop tough skin out of necessity. Since we lack roots or corroboration of who we are, we must put our trust in memory to give continuity to our lives . . . but memory is always cloudy, we can’t trust it. Things that happened in the past have fuzzy outlines, they’re pale; it’s as if my life has been nothing but a series of illusions, of fleeting images, of events I don’t understand, or only half understand. I have absolutely no sense of certainty. Nor can I picture Chile as a geographic locale with certain precise characteristics: a real and definable place. I see it the way a country road might look as night falls, when the long shadows of the poplars trick our vision and the landscape is no more substantial than a dream.

It’s so cute, isn’t it?” Arianna said dreamily. “Are we seeing the same creature? It’s like a demented goat with a bone growth.” “You’re going to hurt its feelings! Now shut up and sit on the ground.” I did as I was told, sticking my ankle out. “How is it going to heal me?” I asked, suddenly nervous. I pictured it licking my ankle and gagged. I could only imagine the diseases unicorn saliva had or what it carried around in its filthy, matted beard and hair. Bleating reproachfully, it stared at me with its doleful, square-pupiled brown eyes. “Oh, fine. Great, glorious unicorn, beloved of oblivious girls everywhere, please heal me. Now, if you don’t mind.” With one last bat of its gunk-crusted eyelashes, it lowered its head and put its stubby horn against my ankle. I cringed, waiting for pain, but felt instead tingling warmth spread out, almost like having butterflies in my stomach. Only in my ankle. Butterflies . . . with rainbows. The feeling of wholeness and well-being spread up my leg and into my entire body, and I couldn’t stop grinning. The forest was beautiful! The tree branches, naked against the brightening sky, held unimaginable wonders. The hard-packed dirt beneath me was a treasure trove of unrealized potential, lovely for what it could eventually give life to. I could sit out here forever and just enjoy nature. I was so happy! And rainbows! Why did I keep thinking of rainbows? Who cared! Rainbows were totally awesome! And the unicorn! I beamed at it, reaching out my hand to stroke it. There was never a creature more beautiful, more majestic. I’d spend the rest of my life out here, and we’d prance around the forest, worship the sunlight, bathe in the moonlight, and . . . I shook my head, scattering the idiotic warm fuzzies that had invaded. “Whoa,” I said, shoving the unicorn’s head away. “That’s enough of that.” I looked down at my ankle, which was now completely healed, not even a scar left. I fixed a stern look on the unicorn. “I am not going to frolic in an eternal meadow of sunshine and moonlight with you, you rotten little fink. But thanks.” I smiled, just enough to be nice without being too encouraging, and patted it quickly on the head. I was going to soak that hand in bleach. “Okay, let’s get out of here.” I stood, testing my ankle and relieved with the utter lack of pain. I still had an irrational desire to do an interpretive dance about rainbows, but it was a small price to pay for being healed.

Actually, the great traveler is usually a small, mussy person in a faded, green, fuzzy hat, inconspicuous in a corner of the steamer bar. He speaks only one language, and that gloomily. He knows all the facts about 19 countries except the home lives, wage scales, exports, religions, politics, agriculture, history and languages of those countries. He is as valuable as Baedeker in regard to hotels and railroads, only not so accurate. He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something. He who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little, and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all. Four hundred pictures on a wall are four hundred times less interesting than one picture, and no one knows a cafe until he has gone there often enough to know the names of the waiters. These are the laws of travel.

Sat in the Jacuzzi last night looking at the dark recesses of the nozzles. Remembering the story I wrote about spiders nesting there. Multifaceted eyes watching me watching them, almost like when you set two mirrors parallel to each other, accept this infinity ends up in some fuzzy creature’s belly. I have a nice picture of a Hobo spider in my backyard, venom dripping off one of those nasty fangs of theirs. Son of a bitch is looking at me and his mouth is watering waiting for me to stick my hand under the rock he’s nested in. I hate it when you spray a spider with insecticide and it curls up for a few minutes, then uncurls and staggers home. I’m like an arachnid cheap date that sucks!! I just picture the spider staggering into the nest and the female spider asking, “Is that Raid I smell on you?” The spider just smiles (interesting thing to picture) and passes out.

Neutrons and protons occupy the atom's nucleus. The nucleus of an atom is tiny- only one millionth of a billionth of the full volume of an atom- but fantastically dense, since it contains virtually all the atom's mass. As Cropper has put it, if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would only be about the size of a fly- but a fly many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral... The picture that nearly everybody has in mind of an atom is of an electron or two flying around a nucleus, like planets orbiting a sun. This image... is completely wrong... In fact, as physicists were soon to realize, electrons are not like orbiting planets at all, but more like the blades of a spinning fan, managing to fill every bit of space in their orbits simultaneously (but with the crucial difference that the blades of a fan only seem to be everywhere at once; electrons are)... So the atom turned out to be quite unlike the image that most people had created. The electron doesn't fly around its sun, but instead takes on the more amorphous aspect of a cloud. The "shell" of an atom isn't some hard shiny casing, as illustrations sometimes encourage us to suppose, but simply the outermost of these fuzzy electron clouds. The cloud itself is essentially just a zone of statistical probability marking the area beyond which the electron only very seldom strays. Thus an atom, if you could see it, would look more like a very fuzzy tennis ball than a hard-edged metallic sphere (but not much like either, or, indeed, like anything you've ever seen; we are, after all, dealing here with a world very different from the one we see around us. p145

As the subject watches the movies, the MRI machine creates a 3-D image of the blood flow within the brain. The MRI image looks like a vast collection of thirty thousand dots, or voxels. Each voxel represents a pinpoint of neural energy, and the color of the dot corresponds to the intensity of the signal and blood flow. Red dots represent points of large neural activity, while blue dots represent points of less activity. (The final image looks very much like thousands of Christmas lights in the shape of the brain. Immediately you can see that the brain is concentrating most of its mental energy in the visual cortex, which is located at the back of the brain, while watching these videos.) Gallant’s MRI machine is so powerful it can identify two to three hundred distinct regions of the brain and, on average, can take snapshots that have one hundred dots per region of the brain. (One goal for future generations of MRI technology is to provide an even sharper resolution by increasing the number of dots per region of the brain.) At first, this 3-D collection of colored dots looks like gibberish. But after years of research, Dr. Gallant and his colleagues have developed a mathematical formula that begins to find relationships between certain features of a picture (edges, textures, intensity, etc.) and the MRI voxels. For example, if you look at a boundary, you’ll notice it’s a region separating lighter and darker areas, and hence the edge generates a certain pattern of voxels. By having subject after subject view such a large library of movie clips, this mathematical formula is refined, allowing the computer to analyze how all sorts of images are converted into MRI voxels. Eventually the scientists were able to ascertain a direct correlation between certain MRI patterns of voxels and features within each picture. At this point, the subject is then shown another movie trailer. The computer analyzes the voxels generated during this viewing and re-creates a rough approximation of the original image. (The computer selects images from one hundred movie clips that most closely resemble the one that the subject just saw and then merges images to create a close approximation.) In this way, the computer is able to create a fuzzy video of the visual imagery going through your mind. Dr. Gallant’s mathematical formula is so versatile that it can take a collection of MRI voxels and convert it into a picture, or it can do the reverse, taking a picture and then converting it to MRI voxels. I had a chance to view the video created by Dr. Gallant’s group, and it was very impressive. Watching it was like viewing a movie with faces, animals, street scenes, and buildings through dark glasses. Although you could not see the details within each face or animal, you could clearly identify the kind of object you were seeing. Not only can this program decode what you are looking at, it can also decode imaginary images circulating in your head.

Though my approach throughout the book will be positive and expository, it is worth noting from the outset that I intend to challenge this dominant paradigm in each of its main constituent parts. In general terms, this view holds the following: (1) that the Jewish context provides only a fuzzy setting, in which ‘resurrection’ could mean a variety of different things; (2) that the earliest Christian writer, Paul, did not believe in bodily resurrection, but held a ‘more spiritual’ view; (3) that the earliest Christians believed, not in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, but in his exaltation/ascension/glorification, in his ‘going to heaven’ in some kind of special capacity, and that they came to use ‘resurrection’ language initially to denote that belief and only subsequently to speak of an empty tomb or of ‘seeing’ the risen Jesus; (4) that the resurrection stories in the gospels are late inventions designed to bolster up this second-stage belief; (5) that such ‘seeings’ of Jesus as may have taken place are best understood in terms of Paul’s conversion experience, which itself is to be explained as a ‘religious’ experience, internal to the subject rather than involving the seeing of any external reality, and that the early Christians underwent some kind of fantasy or hallucination; (6) that whatever happened to Jesus’ body (opinions differ as to whether it was even buried in the first place), it was not ‘resuscitated’, and was certainly not ‘raised from the dead’ in the sense that the gospel stories, read at face value, seem to require.11 Of course, different elements in this package are stressed differently by different scholars; but the picture will be familiar to anyone who has even dabbled in the subject, or who has listened to a few mainstream Easter sermons, or indeed funeral sermons, in recent decades.

I took off my top because I didn’t know if I could.” “Mmm,” Eric said, nodding. “I’d never done a nude scene and I wasn’t sure that I would be able to do it. So I did it in real life and then I realized I could do it in the movie. I just, you know, forgot that other people could see me.” “That’s understandable. It must be difficult to shift back and forth between reality and fiction, especially with such an intense role. We can come back to that or leave it alone. For now, how about some Skee-Ball?” Annie nodded. “Annie,” she told herself, “shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up.” When the pictures hit the Internet, fuzzy and low-resolution but without a doubt her, Annie’s parents sent her an e-mail that read: It’s about time you started playing with the idea of celebrity and the female form as viewed object. Her brother did not say or write a single word, seemed to disappear; perhaps that’s what happens when a sibling sees you naked. Her on-and-off boyfriend, currently off, called her and, when she answered the phone, said, “Is this a Fang thing? I mean, is it just inescapable that you’ll do weird shit?

The tame and scripted worship of God that gave me warm and fuzzy feelings never came that day, and at the same time, my mental picture of God's glory's blown to bits. Up until then, worship had been about how I felt; on that day, God expanded my viewpoint to see that He is not wildly concerned with how I feel but is wildly out for His own glory. Singing to Him, praying to Him, talking about Him, learning more about His nature and goodness and work in our lives - this all benefits us, but it's not about us. The point of our worship is not our joy or our advancement. God's sole purpose in calling His people to worship Him is allowing them to give Him glory because He wants it.

Ella woke again as they entered the picturesque village of Bibury. A stone bridge arched over the placid River Coln, and Ella craned her neck to watch a swan and its fuzzy, brown cygnets floating alongside beds of watercress and the boggy watermeadow called Rack Isle. Ella lifted her phone and snapped a picture. "It's like someone cued them." "I called ahead." They drove past a row of sandstone cottages with colorful gardens, and in the center of town, Heather pointed out the ancient Saxon church. "St. Mary's was on a Christmas stamp a few decades back." Ella rolled down her window to take another picture. "It's all so- so perfect.

Betsy lost her peach.” I can’t resist. “That’s the pits.” She blinks at me. For a moment, she doesn’t say a word, and I picture a plane crashing and burning… Until I see the twinkle in her eye. Her lips press together, and she holds out her hand. “She’s a little fuzzy on the details.” My lips tighten, and I hold out the tennis ball. “She seemed speachless.” “She needs to practice what I peach.

I pictured the eggs inside of my body like they were grapes gone bad. Sour, rotten fruit, skin bruised and fuzzy with mold, caving in on themselves.

I pictured the eggs inside of my body like they were grapes gone bad. Sour, rotten fruit, skin bruised and fuzzy with mould, caving in on themselves.

You’d think after all I’ve done for my cat—the belly rubs, the back scratches, the endless cans of Fancy Feast—you’d think she could at least wear a pair of reindeer antlers for three minutes while I took her picture for my annual Christmas card. But, no, Prozac, the little drama queen, had decided that the fuzzy felt antlers I’d ordered online were emissaries from the devil and was determined to avoid them at all costs.

Smiling to myself, I pictured our family one sunny afternoon last fall. It had been a warm day, and we were on our way to the city aquarium. Dad had the car windows rolled down, and I recalled the feel of the wind in my hair and the scent of Mom’s perfume wafting from the seat in front of me. Mom and Dad were chatting and I was scrolling through my Instagram feed. But the moment the song sounded on the radio, I squealed. “Turn it up!” I said, leaning forward in my seat, enough that the belt tightened across my chest. As soon as Dad reached over and turned the knob, I started singing the lyrics aloud. Both Mom and Dad joined in. With the wind in my hair and the music filling the car, a warmth had filled my insides, almost as if I were wrapped in my favorite fuzzy blanket. The memory was fresh in my mind and I could still see Mom’s head bob up and down as she sang while Dad tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Come on, Dad!” I said, giggling. “Sing with us.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “I’m waiting for my favorite part. I don’t want to stretch my singing muscles.” “What singing muscles?” Mom smiled at him. He put a finger in the air for her to wait. “Here we go.” When the chorus of the song began, Dad screeched out the lyrics in a really high voice. He was trying to mimic the singer’s voice but he wasn’t even close and the sound he made was terrible. I burst out laughing. He ignored me and continued to sing, all the while, waving a hand through the air with wide flourishes, as if conducting an orchestra. He tilted his head back and belted out the high notes. When we pulled up at a red traffic light and the car slowed to a stop, Dad was oblivious of the carload of people alongside us watching him. The passengers of the other car had their windows open too and I stared at them in horror. Their eyes were glued to Dad and they shook their heads and rolled their eyes. “Dad!” I called to him. “Those people are watching you.” But he didn’t hear me and continued to sing. I sank into my seat, my cheeks flushing. He finally realized he had an audience but instead of being embarrassed, he waved to them. “Hello, there!” he said. “Did you enjoy my singing?” The light turned green, and the carload of people cracked up laughing as their car lurched forward in their hurry to escape the weird man in the car next to theirs. Dad shrugged. “I guess not.’ Mom and I burst out laughing too, unable to hold it in any longer. Dad waved a dismissive hand. “They wouldn’t know good music if it hit them in the face.” Tears sprang from my eyes because I was laughing so hard. My dad could be so embarrassing sometimes, but that day, it didn’t bother me at all. Dad had always managed to make me laugh at the silliest things. He had a way of making me feel happy, regardless of what mood I was in. Deep down I thought he was a really cool dad. My friends thought so too. He wasn’t boring and super strict like their dads. He was fun to be around and everyone loved him for it, including my friends. Our little family was perfect, and I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

Inside, though, the picture is a little more fuzzy. I do feel strong, in some ways, but the way I reacted to Jimbo’s passing and to waking up in Matt’s arms have made me suspect that at least some of that strength still lives in a house built

memory challenges have strengthened my faith, even in things I can’t see or feel or touch, because so much in my life is a dream or a memory, fuzzy at the seams, brought into focus only by my imagination. The picture that comes to mind of the earrings I lost as a kid is no clearer to me than the picture of the future I hope for. But I believe in them both. I trust in their existence.

From late afternoon into the evening on September 4, we tugged Angus over Titanic’s bow five times, cameras snapping away. I was still being cautious, keeping Angus 20 to 30 feet above Titanic’s decks. I knew that the pictures were likely to be fuzzy. After midnight on September 5, word came from our onboard lab that the photos weren’t clear enough.