Aperture Quotes

The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time. ~ Aldous Huxley

The widest, most open, most accepting aperture, the one providing the narrowest, most demanding depth of field. She and Naomi had joked about the sexuality of camera apertures, that they needed to write a woman's monograph on the symbolism and cultural relevance of the mechanics of image-making as it related to sex, so that, for example, stopping down the fixed 35mm lens's diaphragm - elegantly composed of nine leaf-shutter blades - to a tight f/16 would be the equivalent of executing a Kegel pelvic floor exercise. ~ David Cronenberg

no aperture is numbed ; no matter if it seems void ~ Huma Kirmani

It comes out from no source, it goes back in through no aperture. It has reality yet no place where it resides; it has duration yet no beginning or end. Something emerges, though through no aperture - this refers to the fact that it has reality. It has reality yet there is no place where it resides - this refers to the dimension of space. It has duration but no beginning or end - this refers to the dimension of time. There is life, there is death, there is a coming out, there is a going back in - yet in the coming out and going back its form is never seen. This is called the Heavenly Gate. The Heavenly Gate is nonbeing. The ten thousand things come forth from nonbeing. Being cannot create being out of being; inevitably it must come forth from nonbeing. Nonbeing is absolute nonbeing, and it is here that the sage hides himself. ~ Zhuangzi

People say the darkness is where secrets are best hidden. Night time brings clarity and focus to owls, even if the aperture of this vision comes with a stigma. ~ Kimberly Morgan

WATCH THAT QCD POSITION! While I was writing this book, I hosted a lighting seminar for neophyte photographers using cameras of all breeds, and out of 30 photographers in two sessions, no fewer than four Canon shooters were having trouble setting the aperture when using the Manual exposure mode I was having them use while working with studio flash units. (Each of them rarely used Manual.) All four had accidentally set the QCD switch to Lock (if they were 7D owners) or to the On (only) position (if they were 50D or 40D users), disabling the Quick Control Dial. I expect that this happens more frequently than I suspected, so I'm calling it to your attention once more in these two sidebars. ~ David D. Busch

When you narrow down your range and are looking through just that narrow aperture of the lens, the intensity of what you see is so much greater. ~ Michael Snow

Somewhere out of sight a punching-bag was rat-tat-tatting on a board. I stepped through a doorless aperture opposite the door I'd come in by, and found myself in the main hall. It was comparatively small, with seats for maybe a thousand rising on four sides to the girders that held up the roof. An ingot of lead-gray light from a skylight fell through the moted air onto the empty roped square on the central platform. Still no people, but you could tell that people had been there. The same air had hung for months in the windowless building, absorbing the smells of human sweat and breath, roasted peanuts and beer, white and brown cigarettes, Ben Hur perfume and bay rum and hair oil and tired feet. A social researcher with a good nose could have written a Ph.D. thesis about that air. ~ Ross Macdonald

Fortunately, no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds up again. No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured, touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad, and other derogations, she emanates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for Wild Woman, Even the more repressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feelings which are lush and wild, that is, natural. Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I wrote Beyond The Label to open up the aperture through which we look at the world. I want us to reconsider what it means to be a woman, a mentor, a wife, a mother. ~ Maureen Chiquet

On the next clear night, look up in the direction of the constellation humanity calls Cancer. Between the pincers of the right claw of that giant crab in the sky sits a faint star. No matter how hard you stare, you won't see it with the naked eye. It can only be viewed through a telescope with a thirty-meter aperture. Even if you could travel at the speed of light, fast enough to circle the earth seven and a half times in a single second, it would take over forty years to reach that star. ~ Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Photography isolates the world via an aperture and gives the photographer the means to see differently, to achieve a spontaneous vision that is direct and uncompromising. ~ Ellsworth Kelly

I was just taking pictures to see what they looked like. Just for the fun of it. It wasn't about anything in some cases. Some of them were just about the joy of opening up an aperture and seeing what shows up. ~ Sally Mann

bullet wound n.
ballistically induced aperture in the subcutaneous environment ~ William D. Lutz

The kernels of wheat entered the aperture virtually in single file, as if passing between a thumb and an index finger. To mill any faster risked overheating the stone, which in turn risked damaging the flour. In this fact, Dave explained, lies the origin of the phrase "nose to the grindstone": a scrupulous miller leans in frequently to smell his grindstone for signs of flour beginning to overheat. (So the saying does not signify hard work as much as attentiveness.) A wooden spout at the bottom of the mill emitted a gentle breeze of warm, tan flour that slowly accumulated in a white cloth bag. I leaned in close for a whiff. Freshly milled whole-grain flour is powerfully fragrant, redolent of hazelnuts and flowers. For the first time I appreciated what I'd read about the etymology of the word "flour" -- that it is the flower, or best part, of the wheat seed. Indeed. White flour has little aroma to speak of; this flour smelled delicious. ~ Michael Pollan

Reading these books. Oh, the endless labor of the intellectual - pouring all this knowledge into the brain through a three-millimeter aperture in the iris. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Storm Warnings

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions. ~ Adrienne Rich

For all the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an inspiration. The stars were comforting. They seemed to demonstrate that the heavens were created for the benefit and instruction of humans. This pathetic conceit became the conventional wisdom worldwide. No culture was free of it. Some people found in the skies an aperture to the religious sensibility. Many were awestruck and humbled by the glory and scale of the cosmos. Others were stimulated to the most extravagant flights of fancy. ~ Carl Sagan

There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That's perfectly alright; it's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny. ~ Carl Sagan

There were times in life when the aperture of your attention span narrowed to such a tight focus that your entire consciousness rested upon a single person. ~ J.R. Ward

The second way to control the light is with the aperture in the lens, which is a diaphragm that opens and closes to control the light. It's measured in cryptic little numbers that only mathematicians and practitioners of the occult understand. ~ David DuChemin

Filmmaking is challenging for men and women. In both cases, it is incredibly difficult. And gender is neither a guarantee of greater sensitivity, capacity for empathy or aperture. ~ Claudia Llosa

The tempest unleashes an alphabetletters fall through the apertures of crazy anglesto spell out the futureuprooting the course of inventionand enslaving the masters ~ Nancy Peters

He watched the aperture of the young women's lovely face close ever so slightly and felt a pang in his heart. ~ James Collins

In order to know someone who is at some level unknowable, you must leave yourself wide open. If you don't, you foreclose the possibility of learning something critical about this person you need, your parent, the person upon whom your survival depends. It's like time-lapse photography; your lens at maximum aperture in order to capture something fleeting and elusive. The problem becomes one of calibration. How to protect yourself in the process. How to capture something without going blind. ~ Camilla Gibb

For low light, all the light rays participate. We're using all the light coming through a large aperture to make a picture with a large depth of field - totally impossible with a conventional camera. ~ Ren Ng

The man was of fine figure, swarthy, and stern in aspect; and he showed in profile a facial angle so slightly inclined as to be almost perpendicular. He wore a short jacket of brown corduroy, newer than the remainder of his suit, which was a fustian waistcoat with white horn buttons, breeches of the same, tanned leggings, and a straw hat overlaid with black glazed canvas. At his back he carried by a looped strap a rush basket, from which protruded at one end the crutch of a hay-knife, a wimble for hay-bonds being also visible in the aperture. His measured, springless walk was the walk of the skilled countryman as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; while in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference personal to himself, showing its presence even in the regularly interchanging fustian folds, now in the left leg, now in the right, as he paced along. ~ Thomas Hardy

Closure, that impossible thing that no one had ever experienced in life, because there always seemed to be a little aperture, a slit of light. ~ Meg Wolitzer

If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power--something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm. We see an omnipotence equal to that of the Cartesian God, and capable of anything, even the inconceivable; but an omnipotence that has become autonomous, without norms, blind, devoid of the other divine perfections, a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas. We see something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God. This is not a Heraclitean time, since it is not the eternal law of becoming, but rather the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law. It is a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death. ~ Quentin Meillassoux

In 1945 J.A. Ratcliffe ... suggested that I [join his group at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge] to start an investigation of the radio emission from the Sun, which had recently been discovered accidentally with radar equipment ... [B]oth Ratcliffe and Sir Lawrence Bragg, then Cavendish Professor, gave enormous support and encouragement to me. Bragg's own work on X-ray crystallography involved techniques very similar to those we were developing for "aperture synthesis", and he always showed a delighted interest in the way our work progressed. ~ Martin Ryle

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself. ~ Alan W. Watts

I went on to explain that it is an honour, and also that we need a transport policy.
"If by 'we' you mean Britain, that's perfectly true," he acknowledged. "But if by 'we' you mean you and me and this Department, we need a transport policy like an aperture in the cranial cavity. ~ Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

Apertures, passages from one world to another. Man's escape hatches. ~ P.K. Page

At night I locked my bedroom door, because [my father] could not sleep and would insist on talking to me, endlessly, without making sense. But there was a small window over the door which could not be locked. One night I woke up to see him slithering through the tiny aperture and jumping nimbly to the floor. But he paid no attention to me. He aimlessly picked up various pieces of heavy mahogany furniture and let them drop with seemingly little effort. In his insanity he had become superhumanly agile and powerful. Staying with him was a nightmare. ~ Jung Chang

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird. ~ Tom Wolfe

Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose somber depths turn us faint ... Yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out. ~ Alan W. Watts

In each studio there is a human being dressed in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expore a vulnerable opening, spreading not his charms but his defences, plotting to disrobe, somewhere along the night
his body without the aperture of the heart or his heart with a door closed to his body. thus keeping one compartment for refuge, one uninvaded cell. ~ Anais Nin

His knees were held together by the skin-tight trousers, which consequently narrowed the aperture through which great quantities of malodorous, rancid dreck were shortly to emerge with great force. St John knew that this was likely to prove troublesome. Although his mid-morning bab was usually undertaken in a more perfunctory manner, he would still have been mindful enough to ensure that his trousers were well below the knee before he commenced the disagreeable act, but in his current predicament, he was in no state to dally. ~ St John Morris