Snap Filter Quotes

They do the twenty-one-gun salute for the good guys, right? So I brought this.” Beckett pointed the gun in the sky. “For Mouse.” One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen shots exploded from Beckett’s gun. “Who am I fucking kidding? What the hell does a gun shot by me mean? Nothing special, that’s for damn sure. Fuck it.” “For Mouse, who watched over my sister and saved Blake and me from more than we could’ve handled in the woods that night.” Livia nodded at Beckett, and he squeezed the trigger. When the sound had cleared, she counted out loud. “Seventeen.” Kyle stepped forward and replaced Livia at Beckett’s arm. “For Mouse. I didn’t know you well, but I wish I had.” The air snapped with the shot. “Eighteen.” Cole rubbed Kyle’s shoulder as he approached. He took the gun from Beckett’s hand. “For Mouse, who protected Beckett from himself for years.” The gun popped again. “Nineteen.” Blake thought for a moment with the gun pointed at the ground, then aimed it at the sky. “For Mouse, who saved Livia’s life when I couldn’t. Thank you is not enough.” The gun took his gratitude to the heavens. “Twenty.” Eve took the gun from Blake, the hand that had been shaking steadied. “Mouse, I wish you were still here. This place was better when you were part of it.” The last shot was the most jarring, juxtaposed with the perfect silence of its wake. As if the bullet was a key in a lock, the gray skies opened and a quiet, lovely snow shower filtered down. The flakes decorated the hair of the six mourners like glistening knit caps. Eve turned her face to be bathed in the fresh flakes. “Twenty-one,” she said softly, replacing her earpiece.

Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.” Helena leans forward, snaps her fingers. “Just what your brain does to interpret a simple stimulus like that is incredible. The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.

What a dolt my father sends me for weaponry,” Paul intoned. “This doltish Gurney Halleck has forgotten the first lesson for a fighting man armed and shielded.” Paul snapped the force button at his waist, felt the crinkled-skin tingling of the defensive field at his forehead and down his back, heard external sounds take on characteristic shield-filtered flatness. “In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack,” Paul said. “Attack has the sole purpose of tricking the opponent into a misstep, setting him up for the attack sinister. The shield turns the fast blow, admits the slow kindjal!” Paul snapped up the rapier, feinted fast and whipped it back for a slow thrust timed to enter a shield’s mindless defenses.

Stand strong, firm and rooted like a solid tree. Though distractions may cause you to waver, remain balanced and calm. Otherwise, you will surely snap in half and fall to the ground at the slightest hint of difficulty. Be a filter, not a sponge. Learn to remove unnecessary junk from your life before it becomes a part of who you are. Stand tall, stand proud, keep your eyes and your body focused. Otherwise, you will blow away with the slightest gust of wind.

In the water-thickets, the path wound tortuously between umber iron-bogs, albescent quicksands of aluminum and magnesium oxides, and sumps of cuprous blue or permanganate mauve fed by slow, gelid streams and fringed by silver reeds and tall black grasses. The twisted, smooth-barked boles of the trees were yellow-ochre and burnt orange; through their tightly woven foliage filtered a gloomy, tinted light. At their roots grew great clumps of multifaceted translucent crystal like alien fungi. Charcoal grey frogs with viridescent eyes croaked as the column floundered between the pools. Beneath the greasy surface of the water unidentifiable reptiles moved slowly and sinuously. Dragonflies whose webby wings spanned a foot or more hummed and hovered between the sedges: their long, wicked bodies glittered bold green and ultramarine; they took their prey on the wing, pouncing with an audible snap of jaws on whining, ephemeral mosquitoes and fluttering moths of april blue and chevrolet cerise. Over everything hung the heavy, oppressive stench of rotting metal. After an hour, Cromis’ mouth was coated with a bitter deposit, and he tasted acids. He found it difficult to speak. While his horse stumbled and slithered beneath him, he gazed about in wonder, and poetry moved in his skull, swift as the jewelled mosquito-hawks over a dark slow current of ancient decay.

Want my opinion, just as an amateur? I think photography’s a much artier art than most people believe. It’s logical to think that, if you’ve got an eye for composition—plus a few technical skills you can learn in any photography class—one pretty place should photograph as well as any other, especially if you’re just into landscapes. Harlow, Maine or Sarasota, Florida, just make sure you’ve got the right filter, then point and shoot. Only it’s not like that. Place matters in photography just like it does in painting or writing stories or poetry. I don’t know why it does, but . . . [There is a long pause.] Actually I do. Because an artist, even an amateur one like me, puts his soul into the things he creates. For some people—ones with the vagabond spirit, I imagine—the soul is portable. But for me, it never seemed to travel even as far as Bar Harbor. The snaps I’ve taken along the Androscoggin, though . . . those speak to me. And they do to others, too. The guy I do business with at Windhover said I could probably get a book deal out of New York, end up getting paid for my calendars rather than paying for them myself, but that never interested me. It seemed a little too . . . I don’t know . . . public? Pretentious? I don’t know, something like that. The calendars are little things, just between friends. Besides, I’ve got a job. I’m happy crunching numbers. But my life sure would have been dimmer without my hobby.

He couldn’t spot them, and the minor foot traffic on the sidewalk was not enough to hide. They must have entered a building or alley. Rather than searching all of them, he let his nose do its job. Big breath in. Filter the smells. Aha. There, up the sidewalk a few more storefronts then into an arcade. The wolves that dragged her probably hoped to hide their scent and sneak out the back. Except Hayder knew this place. He knew where the door to the alley was, thus, when the steel door swung open, he stood there, arms crossed waiting for them. “Shit, he’s here. Get back inside,” the chubby one grunted. “Oh, don’t leave on my account. I insist you stay.” And to make sure they did, he kicked the door shut. The two thugs backed away from him, the one who needed to invest in a treadmill holding Arabella, who hung limp in his grasp, before him as a shield. She was alive. However, her eyes bore a resigned expression Hayder didn’t like at all. “Baby, are you all right? Did they hurt you?” The answer was moot. At this point, he was going to punish them no matter what, violently. They’d done the unforgivable when they’d taken Arabella and scared her. However, if they’d actually hurt her, or if she cried… We’ll make them wish their mother had a headache the night they were conceived. Rawr. Her reply emerged so soft he almost missed it. “I told you this would happen. They’ll never let me be free.” How utterly convinced she seemed and miserable. Totally unacceptable. “Don’t you dare take this without a fight,” he growled. The chubby one should have spent more time on expanding his mind instead of his waistline because he showed no sense at all when he said, “Bella here knows her place, and after the next full moon, it will be on her knees, serving the new alpha of the pack.” Hell no. Hayder didn’t even think twice about it. His fist shot out, and it connected to the idiot’s nose with a satisfying crunch, and that left one wolf. An even dumber wolf that seemed to think the switchblade he’d pulled out of a pocket and waved around would really make a difference. “Are you stupid enough to think you can take me with that puny knife?” Hayder couldn’t stem the incredulity in his query. “Stay back, cat, or else. It’s silver.” Silver, which meant painful if he got sliced with it. Harder to heal, too. But a three-inch blade wasn’t going to keep Hayder away from his woman. As beta, though, he did try to give the idiot a chance. Show patience before acting, or so he’d been taught as part of those anger management courses Leo made him take. Hayder employed one of the tricks to control impulsive acts. He counted. “Three.” “I’ll cut you.” Slash. Slash. The knifeman sketched lines in the air. “Two.” “I mean it.” “One. You’re dead.” Hayder took a step forward even as the last dumb wolf took a step back, one hand clamped around Arabella’s arm. Lightning fast, Hayder shot a hand out to grab the wrist of the guy wielding the knife. This fellow had slightly faster reflexes than his pack brothers and actually managed to score a line of red across his palm. The blood didn’t bother Hayder. ’Twas but a scratch. However, the coppery scent did something to Arabella. Up snapped her head. Her nostrils flared. Her brown eyes took on a wildness. Her lips pulled back in a snarl. “Don’t. Touch. Him!” With a screech, she turned on her captor and then proceeded to go rabid on his ass. How cool.

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove twenty-two miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides--pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. "No one sees the barn," he said finally. A long silence followed. "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn." He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced at once by others. "We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies." There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. "Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism." Another silence ensued. "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said. 13 He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film. "What was the barn like before it was photographed?" he said. "What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions because we've read the. signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We're here, we're now." He seemed immensely pleased by this.

What?” “Nothing.” I snapped my head back to the stove, pouring my water into the mug. “You just seemed the kind who would like milk or sugar.” “Wow, that’s stereotyping.” She took another sip. “I like my coffee like my soul. Dark and bitter with no filter or bullshit.

I snap a picture of him with his back turned to me and post it to my Instagram with a rosy filter. I caption it with three hearts and Game night with my love! No better way to cap off an awesome day, and there’s no one else I’d rather spend it with. xoxo. #LivinTheLife #MarryingMyBestFriend #TrueLovesKissFromARose

EXCERPT: THREE A.M.– …AND JARRED OUT OF SLEEP…. “Roan snapped awake. It took a millisecond for him to key his hearing. Moonlight filtered weakly through the semi-opaque curtains pulled across both windows. His six senses were online and he quietly moved out of bed. He wore only a pair of dark blue cotton pajama bottoms, his upper body naked. Twisting the door knob, the door quietly opened. Slipping like a shadow into the darkened hall, he sensed someone moving around out in the kitchen. Shiloh? He glanced at the watch on his wrist. Three a.m. Halting in the living room, he saw Shiloh in the kitchen, putting a copper tea kettle on the stove. Her hair was unruly and she was wearing pale pink silky pajama bottoms and a pink cotton tee that outlined her breasts to perfection. Hell. She looked sleepy, hair tangled and wasn’t exactly graceful with her movements. The sense that she could not really take care of herself came across strongly to Roan. It wasn’t that Shiloh was weak or stupid. And maybe because of his black ops training, he was at the other end of the spectrum; too alert and having that situational awareness that could help save his life. She was obviously sleepy, rubbing her eyes, yawning. There wasn’t anything to dislike about her and Roan’s mouth flexed downward and thinned. Shiloh wasn’t helpless, just not aware of her surroundings. Maybe he could help her open up her awareness a little more since she was being stalked. It could save her life some day.

As they tramped in, Temo turned from the big stone barbecue with a long grilling fork in his hand. He froze at the sight of Dayna. Once more, it was as though the two of them were alone in the sunny ramada with its roof of woven grass and the light filtering through on their faces. No one else mattered. A short woman with her hair piled on her head hurried from behind the barbecue with a platter of tacos in her hand. “Temo, aren’t you going to introduce me to your new friends?” she asked with a smile. “Temo, what is wrong? Are you sick?” “No, Madre,” Temo muttered, but he still couldn’t take his eyes off Dayna. Dayna’s mother, Brenda Regis, picked that exact moment to stride in from the spa. “Howdy, everybody,” she crooned. “Hope you’re all hungry as coyotes.” She glanced at her daughter, who was still gazing at Temo with lovesick eyes. “Dayna, what’s the matter with you, honey?” She looked Dayna up and down, then her eyes went to Temo, and then to Temo’s mother. The two women stiffened. Say something, Sophie prayed silently to Dayna. Order Temo around in that bossy voice of yours. Quick, before your mother and his mother figure this out. But Dayna stood stunned, incapable of speech. Sophie gave Liv a nudge. “Follow my lead,” she whispered and then in a louder voice shouted, “Hey, is this a good time to break the piñata?” She dived forward to snatch the long fork from Temo’s hand. “Whee!” she shouted. “Fun! Come on, everybody. Let’s see what’s inside!” She poked at the paper horse. Liv grabbed a barbecue brush and bashed at it too. Cheyenne and Hailey joined in with shouts of glee. The paper horse flew to pieces, scattering small objects and cactus candy all over the picnic table. Some fell into the punch bowl with a splash. More landed in the salad plate. Laughter and confusion broke the spell of tension in the air as they all dived for the piñata’s. Dayna snapped out of her trance. “Look what I’ve got!” She held up a plastic whistle, then blew a shrill note. “Time to eat, everybody.” Temo turned back to the barbecue. The spell was broken, the danger past. His mother, Marita, gave him another frightened glance, but went on laying food on the table. Dayna’s mother picked a piece of candy out of her hair and said, “Well! We usually break the piñata after the meal, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

There are plenty of boys clustered around the wall, laughing, shoving each other playfully, yelling, competing for the attention of the girls. But somehow I know that the one who’s staring at me is the boy leaning against the post holding up the canopy, his shoulders square to it, his head ducked over the cigarette he’s holding, a tiny red point flaring in the shadow as he pulls on the filter. I shake my head and say firmly to myself, Smoking’s disgusting. I’m still looking, though. He’s tall and slim, I can tell that much. And his hair, dropping over his forehead, is jet-black, as if he were a hero in a manga book, drawn with pen and ink, two or three thick glossy strands separating into perfect dark curves. I snap my head back from the lurker in the shadows to the actual boy still holding my hand, only to see that Leonardo is looking over my shoulder in the same direction. “Luca!” he exclaims, dropping my hand to wave at someone. “Finalmente!” I am determined not to turn. Just in case it’s the same boy. I don’t want to look too interested, or too eager. Besides, he might be really ugly. Or spotty. Or have some silly chinstrap shaved onto his face-- “Eccolo!” Leonardo’s saying happily, and it would be silly of me, by now, not to turn to face the person who’s strolled over and is leaning against the side of the table. I look up at him, and my heart stops for a moment. “Luca!” Andrea says, echoing Leonardo. “Finalmente!” “This is Luca, our friend,” Leonardo says happily as I think: Luca. Finally. “Ciao,” Luca says, nodding at us, his long legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. He’s wearing a dark blue shirt tucked into black jeans, and silver rings on a couple of his long fingers, the cigarette held loosely between them. His inky hair tumbles over his forehead, and I see, with a shock like a knife to the chest, that his eyes, heavily fringed with thick black lashes, are the midnight blue of sapphires or deep seawater. I can’t speak.

During the next two weeks Trurl fed general instructions into his future electropoet, then set up all the necessary logic circuits, emotive elements, semantic centers. He was about to invite Klapaucius to attend a trial run, but thought better of it and started the machine himself. It immediately proceeded to deliver a lecture on the grinding of crystallographical surfaces as an introduction to the study of submolecular magnetic anomalies. Trurl bypassed half the logic circuits and made the emotive more electromotive; the machine sobbed, went into hysterics, then finally said, blubbering terribly, what a cruel, cruel world this was. Trurl intensified the semantic fields and attached a strength of character component; the machine informed him that from now on he would carry out its every wish and to begin with add six floors to the nine it already had, so it could better meditate upon the meaning of existence. Trurl installed a philosophical throttle instead; the machine fell silent and sulked. Only after endless pleading and cajoling was he able to get it to recite something: "I had a little froggy." That appeared to exhaust its repertoire. Trurl adjusted, modulated, expostulated, disconnected, ran checks, reconnected, reset, did everything he could think of, and the machine presented him with a poem that made him thank heaven Klapaucius wasn't there to laugh — imagine, simulating the whole Universe from scratch, not to mention Civilization in every particular, and to end up with such dreadful doggerel! Trurl put in six cliché filters, but they snapped like matches; he had to make them out of pure corundum steel. This seemed to work, so he jacked the semanticity up all the way, plugged in an alternating rhyme generator — which nearly ruined everything, since the machine resolved to become a missionary among destitute tribes on far-flung planets. But at the very last minute, just as he was ready to give up and take a hammer to it, Trurl was struck by an inspiration; tossing out all the logic circuits, he replaced them with self-regulating egocentripetal narcissistors. The machine simpered a little, whimpered a little, laughed bitterly, complained of an awful pain on its third floor, said that in general it was fed up, through, life was beautiful but men were such beasts and how sorry they'd all be when it was dead and gone. Then it asked for pen and paper.

Dreaming Of Hair" Ivy ties the cellar door in autumn, in summer morning glory wraps the ribs of a mouse. Love binds me to the one whose hair I've found in my mouth, whose sleeping head I kiss, wondering is it death? beauty? this dark star spreading in every direction from the crown of her head. My love's hair is autumn hair, there the sun ripens. My fingers harvest the dark vegtable of her body. In the morning I remove it from my tongue and sleep again. Hair spills through my dream, sprouts from my stomach, thickens my heart, and tangles from the brain. Hair ties the tongue dumb. Hair ascends the tree of my childhood--the willow I climbed one bare foot and hand at a time, feeling the knuckles of the gnarled tree, hearing my father plead from his window, _Don't fall!_ In my dream I fly past summers and moths, to the thistle caught in my mother's hair, the purple one I touched and bled for, to myself at three, sleeping beside her, waking with her hair in my mouth. Along a slippery twine of her black hair my mother ties ko-tze knots for me: fish and lion heads, chrysanthemum buds, the heads of Chinamen, black-haired and frowning. Li-En, my brother, frowns when he sleeps. I push back his hair, stroke his brow. His hairline is our father's, three peaks pointing down. What sprouts from the body and touches the body? What filters sunlight and drinks moonlight? Where have I misplaced my heart? What stops wheels and great machines? What tangles in the bough and snaps the loom? Out of the grave my father's hair bursts. A strand pierces my left sole, shoots up bone, past ribs, to the broken heart it stiches, then down, swirling in the stomach, in the groin, and down, through the right foot. What binds me to this earth? What remembers the dead and grows towards them? I'm tired of thinking. I long to taste the world with a kiss. I long to fly into hair with kisses and weeping, remembering an afternoon when, kissing my sleeping father, I saw for the first time behind the thick swirl of his black hair, the mole of wisdom, a lone planet spinning slowly. Sometimes my love is melancholy and I hold her head in my hands. Sometimes I recall our hair grows after death. Then, I must grab handfuls of her hair, and, I tell you, there are apples, walnuts, ships sailing, ships docking, and men taking off their boots, their hearts breaking, not knowing which they love more, the water, or their women's hair, sprouting from the head, rushing toward the feet.

A defective filter permits the “grounds to get mixed up with the coffee.” An ADDer experiences the world as a barrage to his senses—noises, sights and smells rush in without barriers or protection. Normal noise levels can interfere with his ability to hear conversations or maintain a train of thought. Even in a relatively quiet restaurant, background noises compete for attention and interfere with the ability to listen to the server. During a telephone call, the ADDer may snap at a spouse who makes the slightest noise in the room. Unfiltered visual distractions can make shopping a nightmare. The process of scanning the contents of a large department store can be agonizing. The quantity of choices is overwhelming and often creates feelings of intense anxiety and irritation.