Edge Detection Quotes

Our visual field, the entire view of what we can see when we look out into the world, is divided into billions of tiny spots or pixels. Each pixel is filled with atoms and molecules that are in vibration. The retinal cells in the back of our eyes detect the movement of those atomic particles. Atoms vibrating at different frequencies emit different wavelengths of energy, and this information is eventually coded as different colors by the visual cortex in the occipital region of our brain. A visual image is built by our brain's ability to package groups of pixels together in the form of edges. Different edges with different orientations - vertical, horizontal and oblique, combine to form complex images. Different groups of cells in our brain add depth, color and motion to what we see. ~ Jill Bolte Taylor

Let me in! Quick, Caroline!"
Ma opened the door and Pa slammed it quickly behind him. He was out of breath. He pushed back his cap and said: "Whew! I'm scared yet."
"What was it, Charles?" said Ma.
"A panther," Pa said.
He had hurried as fast as he could go to Mr. Scott's. When he got there, the house was dark and everything was quiet. Pa went all around the house, listening, and looking with the lantern. He could not find a sign of anything wrong. So he felt like a fool, to think he had got up and dressed in the middle of the night and walked two miles, all because he heard the wind howl.
He did not want Mr. and Mrs. Scott to know about it. So he did not wake them up. He came home as fast as he could because the wind was bitter cold. And he was hurrying along the path, where it went on the edge of the bluff, when all of a sudden he heard that scream right under his feet.
"I tell you my hair stood up till it lifted my cap," he told Laura. "I lit out for home like a scared rabbit."
"Where was the panther, Pa?" she asked him.
"In a tree-top," said Pa. "In the top of that big cottonwood that grows against the bluffs there."
"Pa, did it come after you?" Laura asked, and he said, "I don't know, Laura."
"Well, you're safe now, Charles," said Ma.
"Yes, and I'm glad of it. This is too dark a night to be out with panthers," Pa said. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

A life spent at the edge of the pier is a life full of regret, a life full of fear. ~ Ryan Lilly

Blake." Her pleas are so sweet.

"Shhh, Anne just feel it. I have you." Her nipple is so fucking perfect under my mouth.

Her body tense, she's right on the edge. One more push and she'll explode in my hands. Arching her back more, she lets her legs relax open just a little. An unconscious signal... ~ Aden Lowe

Sharon dropped to her knees and reached her hand over the edge. The gesture was supposed to be a sign of support. But she realized then that it was useless. His insanity was like the stream beneath the ground. It only flowed in one direction, into deeper and deeper darkness. She was going to lose him. ~ Christopher Pike

Numinous aura) - which balcony means that even the worst latex slip-and-slide off the steeply curved cerebrum's edge would mean a fall of only a few meters to the broad butylene platform, from which a venous-blue emergency ladder can be detached and lowered to extend down past the superior temporal gyrus and Pons and abducent to hook up with the polyurethane basilar-stem artery and allow a safe shimmy down to the good old oblongata just outside the rubberized meatus at ground zero. ~ David Foster Wallace

What worries me the most,' she continued, 'is the opposite, the possibility that they're not trying. They could communicate with us, all right, but they're not doing it because they don't see any point to it. It's like ... "
she glanced down at the edge of the tablecloth they had spread over the grass
"like the ants. They occupy the same landscape that we do. They have plenty to do, things to occupy themselves. On some level they're very well aware of their environment. But we don't try to communicate with them. So I don't think they have the foggiest notion that we exist. ~ Carl Sagan

I want you to take a sleeve of Thin Mints and line them up on the edge of the kitchen counter and when I'm hungry I can just bend over and sweep a cookie into my mouth like I'm scoring a goal in hockey. ~ Jack Gantos

Trouble is, finding a girl is still a tricky situation, like choosing a hat." He flips off his hat and sweeps a finger along the edge of the brim. "Like, maybe you've had your eye on a fine-looking French number, but when it finally falls onto your head, it loses its appeal... Or maybe you've been told all your life that bison felts are the only hats worth wearing. And when something different comes along, say alligator suede, even though it's the most worthy thing you've seen in your life, you might leave it in the window"--he taps his chin--"until you realize no other hat will fit just right. ~ Stacey Lee

But you were a goody-goody, you said.' 'Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that's what defines us. We're always thinking about the things we don't dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality. ~ Laura Lippman

Like many other unfortunate young people, Harvey had never in all his life received a direct order - never, at least, without long, and sometimes tearful, explanations of the advantages of obedience and the reasons for the request. Mrs. Cheyne lived in fear of breaking his spirit, which, perhaps, was the reason that she herself walked on the edge of nervous prostration. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Live with a man 40 years. Share his house, his meals. Speak on every subject. Then tie him up, and hold him over the volcano's edge. And on that day, you will finally meet the man. ~ Joss Whedon

Your enemies call it comeuppance
and relish the details
of a drug too fine, how long
you must have dangled there beside yourself.
In the middle distance of your
twenty-ninth year, night split open
like a fighter's bruised palm,
a purple ripeness.

Friends shook their heads.
With you it was always
the next attractive trouble,
as if an arranged marriage had been made
in a country of wing walkers, lion tamers,
choirboys leaping from bellpulls
into the high numb glitter, and you,
born with the breath of wild on your tongue
brash as gin.

True, it was charming for a while.
Your devil's balance, your debts.
Then no one was laughing.
Hypodermic needles and cash registers
emptied themselves in your presence.
Cars went head-on.
Sympathy, old motor, ran out
or we grew old, our tongues
wearing little grooves in our mouths
clucking disappointment.

Michael, what pulled you up
by upstart roots
and set you packing,
left the rest of us here, body-heavy
on the edge of our pews.
Over the reverend's lament
we could still hear laughter, your mustache
the angled black wings
of a perfect crow. Later
we taught ourselves the proper method for mourning
haphazard life: salt, tequila, lemon.
Drinking and drifting
in your honor we barely felt a thing. ~ Dorothy Barresi

I like playing characters who are out there on the edge, where they can explode at any moment or fall off the precipice. ~ Jessica Lange

Just then Carter burst through the door of my room. His hair was wild and he had a frantic look in his eyes.
I bolted up in bed, "What's wrong?"
"Eva." He dropped to his knees at the edge of my bed and grasped my hips with both of his palms. He laid his head in my lap and I ran my fingers through his hair.
"I knew something was wrong when I left. I knew we weren't right. I tried to go home. I tried to workout, get work done, go to bed. My bed sheets feel empty when you're not there. Your heartbeat helps me sleep. Your breath soothes my soul. I know you're mad, but, please don't leave. Don't run on me Eva, I love you, more than I knew I could ever love anyone. When we're apart I think of nothing but you. You're my everything. ~ Adriane Leigh

I've always liked New York, as I like towns with an edge and New York has a European feel, so when I came to play music here in the '80s it was a surprise to me. ~ Billy Childish

I had that teetering-on-the-edge-of-a-cliff feeling - it would be so easy to close my eyes and let myself fall down into the unknown. But it was terrifying, that feeling. I preferred to be standing firmly on stable ground. So I did my best to pull back from the cliff's edge. ~ Dallas Woodburn

Whatever variety evolution brings forth ... Every new dimension of world-response ... means another modality for God's trying out his hidden essence and discovering himself through the surprises of world-adventure ... the heightening pitch and passion of life that go with the twin rise of perception and motility in animals. The ever more sharpened keenness of appetite and fear, pleasure and pain, triumph and anguish, love and even cruelty - their very edge is the deity's gain. Their countless, yet never blunted incidence - hence the necessity of death and new birth - supplies the tempered essence from which the Godhead reconstitutes itself. All this, evolution provides in the mere lavishness of its play and sternness of its spur. Its creatures, by merely fulfilling themselves in pursuit of their lives, vindicate the divine venture. Even their suffering deepens the fullness of the symphony. Thus, this side of good and evil, God cannot lose in the great evolutionary game. ~ Hans Jonas

The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. ~ C.S. Lewis

One answer to the transitory nature of imperial rule, in short, is that there is a Newtonian third law of empires. The exercise of imperial power generates an opposite and equal reaction among those affected by it, until they so reorganize themselves as to blunt the imperial edge. ~ Peter Heather

A painting is an object which has an emphatic frontal surface. On such a surface, I paint a black band which does not recede, a color band which does not obtrude, a white square or rectangle which does not move back or forth, to or fro, or up or down; there is also a painted white exterior frame band which is edged round the edge to the black. Every part is painted and contiguous to its neighbor; no part is above or below any other part. There is no hierarchy. There is no ambiguity. There is no illusion. There is no space or interval (time). ~ Jo Baer

I have this friend, Jake," Mr. Mitchell says, sitting on the edge of his desk. "One day, I needed a favor. It wasn't a big favor, but I called him and told him I needed something. Know what he said?"
We shake our heads.
"He said, 'Sure.' Before he eve knew what i was going to ask him. You know why?"
We shake our heads again.
"Because he trusted me not to ask him to do something he couldn't or wouldn't want to do. He knew that whatever i asked for, he would help me simply because he was my friend and I needed help. That's true friendship. ~ Jo Knowles

Every one of the restraints she'd locked into place after she'd rampaged through Endovier snapped free. An icy, endless rage swept through her, wiping away everything except the plan that she could see with brutal clarity. The killing clam, Arobynn Hamel had once called it. Even he had never realized just how calm she could get when she went over the edge. If they wanted Adarlan's Assassin, they'd get her. And Wryd help them when she arrived. ~ Sarah J. Maas

The creative writer is compulsively concrete ... His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions ... ~ Wallace Stegner

As it turned out, the story he told wasn't about doping; it was about power. It was about an ordinary guy who worked his way up to the top of an extraordinary world, who learned to play a shadowy chess match of strategy and information at the outermost edge of human performance. It was about a corrupt but strangely chivalrous world, where you would take any chemical under the sun to go faster, but wait for your opponent if he happened to crash. ~ Tyler Hamilton

Micah knew the power of a look. When two people touched from across a distance, that touch could be frightening, wary, or a stroke of gentleness. He stroked her gently. He never let his eyes dip below her chin; rather, he let himself take in every nuance of expression, every shift of each facial motion, the flicker of her lashes, the shadows in her eyes, the tension in her small body.
She was like a bird ready to fly. Poised at the edge of her seat, her body stiff and prepared to run. ~ Lora Leigh

I went up above the quay past the steps to the hotel. I saw a man through the window with a beer in his hand, and another man with a basket full of eggs. I was feeling heavy now, and tired, and I stood there leaning backwards with my hands crossed behind my back at the end of the breakwater before I walked on to the beach on the other side and some way along on the hard-frozen white sand. It had started to blow a bit, and it was still cold with no snow, so I took off my scarf and tied it round my head and ears and sat down in the shelter of a dune and blew into my hands to warm them before I lit a cigarette. Poker ran along the edge of the water with a seagull's wing in his mouth, and I was so young then, and I remember thinking: I'm twenty-three years old, there is nothing left in life. Only the rest. ~ Per Petterson

Partying on the Malecon

One of the most exciting areas in Havana is the Malecon, a protective sea wall which buffers the northern edge of the Vedado neighborhood of Havana, from the Straits of Florida. Busiest during weekends, it is the most popular place to stroll and is an unrivaled meeting spot for guys and dolls. For this activity the primary party area is the corner of the Malecon and La Rampa, and for a country as poor as Cuba the Malecon offers a reasonable form of entertainment and people watching. Although there are nightclubs in Havana, spending an evening along the Malecon, is probably the best way to enjoy the pulse of Havana and offers visitors a chance to interact with friendly locals. ~ Hank Bracker

Do you feel it?"
"Feel what?" He sat on the edge of my bed.
"My heart beating in your hands. ~ Jewel E. Ann

On the way I stood a moment looking out across the marshes with tall cattails, a patch of water, more marsh, then the woods with a few birch trees shining white at the edge on beyond. In
the darkness it all looked just like I felt. Wet and swampy and gloomy, very gloomy. In the morning I painted it. My memory of it is that it was probably my best painting that summer ~ Georgia O'Keeffe

I closed my eyes, flared my nostrils, and let the scents flood in. The strongest of them, caramel and brown sugar, smell as yellow-orange as the sun, came first. That one was easy. The one that anyone would notice coming into the shop. And then chocolate of course, the bitter dark and the sugary milk chocolate. I don't think a normal girl would've smelled anything else, and part of me wanted to stop there. But I could feel Sam's heart pounding behind me, and for once, I gave in.
Peppermint swirled into my nostrils, sharp as glass, then raspberry, almost too sweet, like too-ripe fruit. Apple, crisp and pure. Nuts, buttery, warm, earthy, like Sam. The subtle, mild scent of white chocolate. Oh, God, some sort of mocha, rich and dark and sinful. I sighed with pleasure, but there was more. The butter cookies on the shelves added a floury, comforting scent, and the lollipops, a riot of fruit scents too concentrated to be real. The salty bite of pretzels, the bright smell of lemon, the brittle edge of anise. Smells I didn't even know names for. I groaned. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

To have suffered ... sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth and has to be learned in the fire. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Today I raised your letter hastily to my lips, and it set my teeth on edge. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I am Sa'kagé a lord of shadows. I claim the shadows that the Shadow may not. I am the strong arm of deliverance. I am Shadowstrider. I am the Scales of Justice. I am He-Who-Guards-Unseen. I am Shadowslayer. I am Nameless. The coranti shall not go unpunished. My way is hard but I serve unbroken. In ignobility nobility. In shame honor. In darkness light. I will do justice and love mercy. Until the king returns I shall not lay my burden down."

--(Durzo Blint to Jorses Alkestes, quoted to Skylar at the edge of Ezra's Forest.) ~ Brent Weeks

The colors are stunning. In a single view, I see - looking out at the edge of the earth: red at the horizon line, blending to orange and yellow, followed by a thin white line, then light blue, gradually turning to dark blue and various gradually darker shades of gray, then black and a million stars above. It's breathtaking. ~ William C. McCool

Channel the power of anger into the admirable qualities of passion, strength, and conviction or courage. Use quiet, carefully modulated words surrounding an edge of steel. ~ Gerald J. Lieberman

There's still nothing I love more than being in the air. I've always liked speed and things on wheels, going out there and putting it all out there, being on the edge. ~ Rickie Fowler

Margaret herself hadn't known her body was a parish bell tolling at every heartbreak she heard of, and that night with Pete calmly sitting on the edge of her favorite chair, invading her private room with words this room was sealed from, she felt it just as a bell would. It struck her right inside, until her bronze skin rang out the news. Not of Pete's story, which had not even made him cry, but some other story she'd been trying not to tell herself. So she sat stiffly there and wept, clanging and clanging like a thing that tested its own breaking. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

Jaime smiled. "I hope you're not thinking of taking the black on us, sweet brother."
Tyrion laughed. "What, me, celibate? The whores would go begging from Dorne to Casterly Rock. No, I just want to stand on top of the Wall and piss off the edge of the world. ~ George R R Martin

Only if you count bruises," Min said grimly. "They were upset, all right, at first. Then they saw Moiraine staring off toward Rand's hidey-hole, and decided it was his work. If the Dragon wants to shake the mountain down on our heads, then the Dragon must have a good reason for it. If he decided to make them take off their skins and dance in their bones, they would think it all right." She snorted and rapped the spoon on the edge of the kettle. ~ Robert Jordan

Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you. ~ Mark Lawrence

This isolation has left Americans quite unaware of the world beyong their borders. Americans speak few languages, know little about foreign cultures, and remain unconvinced that they need to rectify this. Americans rarely benchmark to global standards because they are sure that their way must be the best and most advanced. There is a growing gap between America's worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class, on the one hand and the majority of the American people on the other. Without real efforts to bridge it, this divide could destroy America's competitive edge and its political future. ~ Fareed Zakaria

Death sat in His garden, running a whetstone along the edge of His scythe. It was already so sharp that any passing breeze that blew across it was sliced smoothly into two puzzled zephyrs, ~ Terry Pratchett

She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she grew, the better she wrote. ~ Dean Koontz

Being smart and rich are lucky, but being curious and compassionate will save your ass. Being curious and compassionate can take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder. ~ Mary Karr

Some say Christianity is just a crutch. But let's turn the question on its edge for a moment. Is atheism an emotional crutch, wishful thinking? The ax cuts both ways. Perhaps atheists are rejecting God because they've had a bad relationship with their father. Instead of inventing God, have atheists invented non-God? Have they invented atheism to escape some of the frightening implications of God's existence? Think about it. ~ Greg Koukl

She was right. Peace was the way.
She was right. But at the wrong time. ~ James Blish