Snapshots Quotes

There is something about this process, and about the whole 8 x 10 [camera] business, that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I'm always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless. I wanted them to look like snapshots. And some of them did. ~ Sally Mann

Autobiography is a precious broken vase pieced painstakingly together still showing the chips and cracks. It is a broken truth revealing snapshots of a cracked and chipped life pieced pieced painstakingly together. ~ Chloe Thurlow

'Amazing Grace' is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It's a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don't think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter. ~ Jonathan Kozol

The one thing about kids is that you never really know exactly what they're thinking or how they're seeing. After writing about kids, which is a little bit like putting the experience under a magnifying glass, you realize you have no idea how you thought as a kid. I've come to the conclusion that most of the things that we remember about our childhood are lies. We all have memories that stand out from when we were kids, but they're really just snapshots. You can't remember how you reacted because your whole head is different when you stand aside. ~ Stephen King

The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me. ~ Tom Carter

Nobody looks at opinion polls with more attention than politicians, but of course you've got to remember that a single poll is a snapshot in time. ~ Malcolm Turnbull

I am not trying to say that a passport photo of himself can cure a gloomy man of a gloom for which there is no ground; for true gloom is by nature groundless; such gloom, ours at least, can be traced to no identifiable cause, and with its almost riotous gratuitousness this gloom of ours attained a pitch of intensity that would yield to nothing. If there was any way of making friends with our gloom, it was through the photos, because in these serial snapshots we found an image of ourselves which, though not exactly clear, was - and that was the essential - passive and neutralized. They gave us a kind of freedom in our dealings with ourselves; we could drink beer, torture our blood sausages, make merry and play. We bent and folded the pictures, and cut them up with little scissors we carried about with us for this precise purpose. We juxtaposed old and new pictures, made ourselves one-eyed or three-eyed, put noses on our ears, made our exposed right ears into organs of speech or silence, combined chins and foreheads. And it was not only each with his own likeness that we made these montages; Klepp borrowed features from me and I from him: thus we succeeded in making new, and we hoped, happier creatures. ~ Gunter Grass

The snapshot has no pretense or ambition. Innocence is the quintessence of the snapshot. I wish to distinguish between innocence and ignorance. Innocence is one of the highest forms of being and ignorance is one of the lowest. ~ Lisette Model

For Lewis, the narration of his own story was about the identification of a pattern of meaning. This enabled him to grasp the "big picture" and discern the "grand story" of all things, so that the snapshots and stories of his own life could assume a deeper meaning. ~ Alister E. McGrath

The memories seem like snapshots from someone else's life. ~ Lauren Oliver

I'm growing as an individual, but your always growing. All of my albums are snapshots of where I am artistically. ~ Mos Def

It is in the times when we feel most broken that we can discover how to be better parents, and it is in the pauses and dashes in between when we are able to fill life with all of the delicious discoveries, images, and snapshots that we will carry with us throughout our lifetimes. ~ Soleil Moon Frye

Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny. ~ Ransom Riggs

I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stories, things that weave together many different strands, like a big piece of cloth, not like a photograph. ~ Robert Bringhurst

Have you ever listened to a song from a long time ago; from your past; a song that was filled with so many memories tied to it, that you felt it so deeply- that it made you cry?

And did you listen to it again, intentionally, for a second time? So you could travel back in time through that song; back when everything seemed so much simpler, basic, carefree?

Those are the songs that are the soundtracks of our lives… the ones that bring back childhood memories, deep feelings, snapshots of our lives (or short videos), best friends, first loves, first heartbreaks… births, deaths.

Our lives are like the record albums that we used to play just a few years ago; just yesterday. We played some of the songs over and over again- to the point of which we can sing along with every word as we play it.

Other songs seem somewhat unfamiliar, as we rarely go back to listen to them; we skip over them or we barely listen to the start of it before we turn off the record player. But just like on a record album and just like in our memories, you can't cut a song out off an album... just like you can't cut out a memory.

The songs and memories remain there, side by side; the good ones, the bad ones, the ones that thrill us and the ones that hurt.

Those are the songs that our lives are composed of. Those are the songs that we chase back, back into our our own memories in our private and personal musical time machines. ~ Jose N Harris

Autism is not a snapshot. It's a life. ~ Gerald Fischbach

My greatest achievement is being able to write records that are real snapshots of what's going on in my life. I won't repeat myself for the sake of commerce, or to please other people. ~ Alanis Morissette

The term "FTM-Butch Border War" just sounds like an alien land of yore. How is it that the gravitational pull of my beard and low-voice should hold [my lesbian friend's] masculinity in deferential orbit? That when standing side-by-side we are supposedly read in comparison, rendering her unalterably more feminine - shorthand, in patriarchal societies, for "lesser than"?

Masculinity has more than enough space to spare. But sometimes its flesh-and-blood vessels act as if we have to wound each other for it, like dogs fighting over too few scraps. Anyway, [she] and I know without speaking that in reality, right here and right now in our present moment, that she and I are two different sides of the same coin; two keys sung for the same tune."

- from "Snapshots: "Sharing Space with Women," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014 ~ Mitch Kellaway

All too frequently the amateur will purchase a fine modern camera and proceed to use it for making the most elementary simple snapshots. This surely is like playing 'Chopsticks' on a concert grand piano. ~ Sam Haskins

As the warm air blew in the car, simple snapshots of the life they'd lived together surfaced in his mind; but as always, those images led inexorably to their final day together. ~ Nicholas Sparks

Photos convey a point in time, so for casual snapshots I say wear the trends so you have fun images to look back at. ~ George Kotsiopoulos

When the thing observed ... is seen as an agglomeration of pieces, the details lose their meaning and the whole becomes unrecognizable. This is often true of snapshots in which no pattern of salient shapes organizes the mass of vague and complex nuances. ~ Rudolf Arnheim

I don't want to be myself, ever. I'm terrible at a snapshot. Terrible. I blink all the time. I've got facial Tourette's. Unless I'm working and in that zone, I'm not very good at pictures, really, ~ Kate Moss

I can no more reread my own books than I can watch old home movies or look at snapshots of myself as a child. I wind up sitting on the floor, paralyzed by grief and nostalgia. ~ Francine Prose

It's not about getting by. It's about the stack of tiny little moments of joy and love that add up to a lifetime that's been worthwhile. You can't measure them; you can only capture them, like snapshots in your mind. ~ C. Robert Cargill

Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives. ~ Charles Simic

Every photograph that is made whether by one who considers himself a professional, or by the tourist who points his snapshot camera and pushes a button, is a response to the exterior world, to something perceived outside himself by the person who operates the camera. ~ Eliot Porter

Just like a movie, our lives are simply a series of individual moments, snapshots in time. ~ Bruce Van Horn

on the continent


I'm soft. I
dream too.
I let myself dream. I dream of
being famous. I dream of
walking the streets of London and
Paris. I dream of
sitting in cafes
drinking fine wines and
taking a taxi back to a good
hotel.
I dream of
meeting beautiful ladies in the hall
and
turning them away because
I have a sonnet in mind
that I want to write
before sunrise. at sunrise
I will be asleep and there will be a
strange cat curled up on the
windowsill.

I think we all feel like this
now and then.
I'd even like to visit
Andernach, Germany, the place where
I began, then I'd like to
fly on to Moscow to check out
their mass transit system so
I'd have something faintly lewd to
whisper into the ear of the mayor of
Los Angeles upon to my return to this
fucking place.

it could happen.
I'm ready.
I've watched snails crawl over
ten foot walls
and vanish.

you mustn't confuse this with
ambition.
I would be able to laugh at my
good turn of the cards -

and I won't forget you.
I'll send postcards and
snapshots, and the
finished sonnet. ~ Charles Bukowski

I'm afraid of not having enough time," she clarified. "Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgments and mistakes that everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies. ~ Ann Brashares

By itself, an ordinary snapshot is no less banal than the petite madeleine in Proust's In Search of Lost Time ... but as goad to memory, it is often the first integer in a sequence of recollections that has the power to deny time for the sake of love. ~ Michael Lesy

Thousands of snapshots are taken of JFK that day. Many of them remain hanging in the pubs and homes of Galway. ~ Bill O'Reilly

About 80 percent of the photos on Flickr are public and searchable by everyone. In one sense, it's a place where people upload snapshots from the family reunion, wedding or the birth of a baby or something like that, but it's also a place where people go to show what the world looks like to them. ~ Stewart Butterfield

I think that the photographer must completely control his picture and bring to it all his personality, and in this area most photographs never transcend being just snapshots. When a great photographer does infuse the snapshot with his personality and vision, it can be transformed into something truly moving and beautiful. ~ Duane Michals

Learning that aesthetic as a kid - seeing those photos - made me think that that's what photos are supposed to look like. I never understood snapshots. I was looking at them like, "This is horrible; that's not what a picture is supposed to look like." I was taught by these photos. So when I picked up the camera, though I had never done it before, I kind of already knew what I was doing. ~ Jeff Vespa

Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem! ~ Carolyn Kizer

He shifts and my eyes shatter into thousands of pieces that ricochet around the room, capturing a million snapshots, a million moments in time. Flickering images faded with age, frozen thoughts hovering precariously in dead space, a whirlwind of memories that slice through my soul. ~ Tahereh Mafi

A Hard Life With Memory

I'm a poor audience for my memory.
She wants me to attend her voice nonstop,
but I fidget, fuss,
listen and don't,
step out, come back, then leave again.

She wants all my time and attention.
She's got no problem when I sleep.
The day's a different matter, which upsets her.

She thrusts old letters, snapshots at me eagerly,
stirs up events both important and un-,
turns my eyes to overlooked views,
peoples them with my dead.

In her stories I'm always younger.
Which is nice, but why always the same story.
Every mirror holds different news for me.

She gets angry when I shrug my shoulders.
And takes revenge by hauling out old errors,
weighty, but easily forgotten.
Looks into my eyes, checks my reaction.
Then comforts me, it could be worse.

She wants me to live only for her and with her.
Ideally in a dark, locked room,
but my plans still feature today's sun,
clouds in progress, ongoing roads.

At times I get fed up with her.
I suggest a separation. From now to eternity.
Then she smiles at me with pity,
since she knows it would be the end of me too. ~ Wisława Szymborska

She loved all the wolves behind her house, but she loved one of them most of all.
And this one loved her back. He loved her back so hard that even the things that weren't special about her became special: the way she tapped her pencil on her teeth, the off-key songs she sang in the shower, how when she kissed him he knew it meant for ever.
Hers was a memory made up of snapshots: being dragged through the snow by a pack of wolves, first kiss tasting of oranges, saying goodbye behind a cracked windshield.
A life made up of promises of what could be: the possibilities contained in a stack of college applications, the thrill of sleeping under a strange roof, the future that lay in Sam's smile.
It was a life I didn't want to leave behind.
It was a life I didn't want to forget.
I wasn't done with it yet. There was so much more to say. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

You can't go back. Once it's done, it's done. I'm sure there will be things that I would love to change, in the future, but each movie is a snapshot of its time and the resources, and you do your best on it. ~ David Ayer

We are drawn to horror even as we recoil from it. ~ Jodi Picoult

You never heard me tell you that I want everything, not just the perfect pieces, not just the sparkling, charming snapshots of you. You never let me tell you that I want every piece of you, even the broken ones, even the dark places where scary things hide. ~ Amy Reed

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality. ~ Cyril Connolly

All we see of someone at any moment is a snapshot of their life, there in riches or poverty, in joy or despair. Snapshots don't show the million decisions that led to that moment. ~ Richard Bach

It is, I suppose, the business of grandparents to create memories and the relative of memories: traditions. We want to lodge moments, like snapshots, in the fleeting video of time. ~ Ellen Goodman

I think a marvelous stunt would be to have your best friend (or the most critical acquaintance) take some candid color snapshots of you from all angles, dressed just as you usually appear at, say, six in the evening. The same hairdo, the same makeup, and if possible the same expression on your face. Be honest! Be sure to have her take the rear views, too.
There ought to be some other shots of you wearing your best going-out-to-dinner dress, or your favorite bridge-with-the-girls costume - hat, gloves, bag, and costume jewelry. Everything. Then have that roll of film developed and BLOWN UP. You can't see much in a tiny snapshot. An eight-by-ten will show you the works - and you probably won't be very happy with it. Sit down and take a long look at that strange woman.
Is she today's with-it person - elegant, poised, groomed, glowing with health? Or is she a plump copy of Miss 1950? Is she sleek, or bumpy in the wrong places? How is her posture? Does she look better from the front than from the back? Does she stand gracefully? […] Feet together or one slightly in front of the other, is the most graceful stance.
[…]
I always pin my bad notices on my mirror. How about keeping those eight-by-ten candid shots around your dressing room for a while as you dress? ~ Joan Crawford

To the Germans, these Jewish foreigners, so different from the local bourgeois Jews who had, with discipline, allowed themselves t be rounded up and slaughtered, seemed suspect: too quick, too energetic, dirty, tattered, proud, unpredictable, primitive, too "Russian". The Jews found it impossible, and at the same time necessary, to distinguish the headhunters they had eluded and on whom they had taken passionate revenge from these shy, reserved old people, these blond, polite children who looked in at the station doors as if through the bars of the zoo. They aren't the ones, no; but it's their father, their teachers, their sons, themselves yesterday and tomorrow. How to resolve the puzzle? It can't be solved. Leave: as soon as possible. This land, too, is searing under our feet, this neat, trim town, loving order, this sweet bland air of full summer also scorches Leave, leave: we haven't come from the depths of Polessia in order to go to sleep in the Wartesaal of Plauen-am-Elster, and to while away our waiting with group snapshots and the Red Cross soup. ~ Primo Levi

I really would like to be involved in things and to understand things, and in some ways you've got to be careful what you wish for because I feel very, very blessed to have such an interesting life and to be able to have little snapshots of lives of people from many different parts of the world. ~ Yo-Yo Ma

When tadpole was born, I spent a sleepless night on the maternity ward gazing intently into her inky, newborn eyes, grappling to come to terms with the indisputable fact that this was an actual person looking back at me, not just a version of Mr Frog, or me, or both, in miniature. From the outset she seemed to know what she wanted, and I realised I could have no inkling of the paths she would choose to follow. But if I watch her life unfold carefully enough, perhaps I will see clear signposts pointing to who or what she will become.
Because when I look backwards, ransacking my own past for clues with the clarity that only hindsight can bring, several defining moments do stand out. Moments charged with significance; snapshots of myself which, if I were to join the dots together, lead me unswervingly to where I stand today. ~ Catherine Sanderson

I remember only images, snapshots burned into me, bleeding into each other until I no longer knew the order in which they had happen. ~ Laure Eve

A word forgot to remember what to forget and every so often let the truth slip - RENEE C. NEBLETT, Snapshots ~ Taiye Selasi

All I can promise myself and everyone else is that this record is a snapshot of thisperiod in my life. It will be that by default. ~ Alanis Morissette

The most effective young Facebook users, however - the ones who will probably be winners if Facebook turns out to be a model of the future they will inhabit as adults - are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves.

They tend their doppelgängers fastidiously. They must manage offhand remarks and track candid snapshots at parties as carefully as a politician. Insincerity is rewarded, while sincerity creates a lifelong taint. Certainly, some version of this principle existed in the lives of teenagers before the web came along, but not with such unyielding, clinical precision. ~ Jaron Lanier

Since the songs were written over a five-year period, I think these are little snapshots. Some people call it political or topical, but I think each song is self-contained. I think it fits together as a picture of the last half-decade of time. ~ Conor Oberst

Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earths history. ~ Bill Bryson

Sound comes to us over time. You don't get a snapshot of sound. Therefore, what you notice with sound, the essential building block, is change. ~ Gary Rydstrom

Church: if the world could see a snapshot of our worship today, would they perceive that we believe our God is worthy of praise? ~ Matt Papa

Nothing can be located in space and time w/out changing angles. Perceive Him as God, or Spirit, or Son, these are mere snapshots from three different angles of one and the same being. Unless the Christians learn how to put them together, they would learn nothing concerning the essence of the Eternal. ~ Vinko Vrbanic

I think that there's a tendency in this town to try to selectively pick snapshots when the broader reality is that we have a record of results and that we're getting things done for the American people. ~ Scott McClellan

I like using snapshot cameras because they're idiot-proof. I have bad eyesight, and I'm no good at focusing big cameras. ~ Terry Richardson

Now I believe that people need to understand what's happening in my campaign, and they're going to get three or four snapshots of that, with plenty of time before the first disclosure happens in June. ~ Craig Benson

Snapshots, moments, mere seconds: as fragile and beautiful and hopeless as a single butterfly, flapping on against a gathering wind. ~ Lauren Oliver

I was always trying to take art photographs, but the most interesting pictures were the snapshots. The artsy pictures were boring, always. ~ Janet Malcolm

Kleiber was the perfect dancer - so perfect that you could see the process. After all, dance is a process; it's a series of snapshots. Kleiber knew how to connect people to the flow, so he could stop managing people. ~ Itay Talgam

A father is a fellow who has replaced the currency in his wallet with snapshots of his kids. ~ Michael Forest

If an election is simply a one-day snapshot of transient mass delusions, then this is not a very noble form of government. ~ James Bovard

A record is just a snapshot of where you are at any time. ~ Norah Jones

In my portraits I try to avoid the fleeting expression and vivacity of a snapshot. ~ Bill Brandt

When I was a boy, my family took great care with our snapshots. We really planned them. We made compositions. We posed in front of expensive cars, homes, that werent ours. We borrowed dogs. Almost every family picture taken of us when I was young had a different borrowed dog in it. ~ Richard Avedon

You see, when you were little they kept sending me snap–shots of you, first as a baby and then as a child in socks playing on the beach with a pail and shovel, and then suddenly as a wistful little girl with wondering, pure eyes - and I used to build dreams about you. A man has to have something living to cling to. I think, Lois, it was your little white soul I tried to keep near me - even when life was at its loudest and every intellectual idea of God seemed the sheerest mockery, and desire and love and a million things came up to me and said: 'Look here at me! See, I'm Life. You're turning your back on it!' All the way through that shadow, Lois, I could always see your baby soul flitting on ahead of me, very frail and clear and wonderful. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

You need a continuous picture of how things are evolving, and not a slow series of snapshots where you don't know how frame A is related to frame B. ~ Eric Betzig

When painting portraits a lot of people say, 'Why not get a photograph of the person?' Photography is wonderful and it is an art form in itself, but ... my portrait is a culmination of elements ... a truer image of a person than just the 'click' of a snapshot. ~ Jamie Wyeth

Never pose your subjects. Let them move about naturally ... All great photographs today are snapshots. ~ Martin Munkacsi

When Gabriel returned, he eagerly opened the wine, smiling to himself wickedly. He was in for a treat, and he knew it. He knew how Julianne looked when she tasted wine, and now he would have a repeat of her erotic performance from the other night. He felt himself twitch more than once in anticipation and wished that he had a video camera secretly placed in his condo somewhere. It would probably be too obvious to pull his camera out and take snapshots of her. He showed her the bottle first, noting with approval the impressed expression that passed across her face when she read the label. He'd brought this special vintage back from Tuscany, and it would have pained him to waste it on an undiscerning palate. He poured a little into her glass and stood back, watching, and trying very hard not to grin. Just as before, Julia swirled the wine slowly. She examined it in the halogen light. She closed her eyes and sniffed. Then she wrapped her kissable lips around the rim of the goblet and tasted it slowly, holding the wine in her mouth for a moment or two before swallowing. Gabriel sighed, watching her as the wine traveled down her long and elegant throat. ~ Sylvain Reynard

Today's connoisseurs of Sino-American relations seem to view the relationship through a dystopian prism; their gloomy commentaries are largely an assemblage of snapshots on contemporary interactions or day-to-day developments without a historical context. ~ Patrick Mendis

Living in France means I see the UK in snapshots. There is something quite nice about being in exile and the things you remember about places tend to be the most vivid details. You don't get that when you see somewhere every day. ~ Jonathan Trigell

I own a few thousand snapshots, which is small by the standards of most collectors I know. I generally only buy photos I think I may actually be able to use in a book one day. I need that focus when buying, because without it I'd just buy everything and my house would be overrun with bucket loads of snapshots; there are just too many beautiful images in the world, and I'd need to own them all. ~ Ransom Riggs

I don't keep a travel diary. I did keep a travel diary once and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down. Everything else slipped away, as though my mind felt jilted by my reliance on pen and paper. For exactly the same reason I don't travel with a camera. My holiday becomes the snapshots and anything I forget to record is lost. ~ Alex Garland

Ask me anything, Bailey challenged.
What are you scared of? The question got out of Tibby's mouth before she meant to ask it.
Bailey thought. I'm afriad of time, she answered. She was brave, unflinching in the big Cyclops eye of the camera. There was nothing prissy or self-conscious about Bailey. I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time, she clarified. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgments and mistakes that eerybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies.
Tibby looked at her in disbelief. She was struck by this new side of Bailey, this philosophical-beyond-her-years Bailey. Did cancer make you wise? Did those chemicals and X rays supercharge her twelve-year-old brain? ~ Ann Brashares

It was the era of photography. This may have influenced us, and played a part in our reaction against anything resembling a snapshot of life. (On the year 1905) ~ Andre Derain

[A digital snapshot] is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical. ~ Geoffrey Batchen

The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity. He takes snapshots, makes notes and records impressions on tablecloths or newspapers, on backs of envelopes or matchbooks. Why one thing and not another is part of the mystery, but he is omnivorous. ~ Paul Rand

I made songs really for myself - I didn't ever expect to put it out there and make this a record for mass consumption, this was really just a way for me to get out of my own situation and reclaim that part of myself - so when making the songs, I wanted a testament to what I'd gone through, I wanted a snapshot of those moments. ~ Frank Iero

It was a tradition to represent a dancer frozen in a chosen position, like a snapshot. I broke away from this tradition by superimposing postures, blending light and motion and scrambling the planes. ~ Sonia Delaunay

[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world ... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within. ~ Eudora Welty

Everyone collects souvenirs, whether they call them that or not. They're evidence that we've taken part in the great dance of life – been places, seen things. They're connections between us and something grander and more eternal than we are. And they belong to us. Tourists shooting blurry mobile-phone-camera snapshots of the 'Mona Lisa' or Niagara Falls want to prove they were there, not to have art to hang on their walls. ~ Michael Hughes

And it means snapshots, because that's what all stories I write come down to; each is a snapshot of who I was during however many days and weeks it was written. A fictional reflection of my mind fossilized, set in paper and ink, instead of stone. Memorialized, for better or worse. This is who I was, and this, and this, and this, and that, and most times I look back and wince. I'm rarely kind to who I was. But other times, looking back is bittersweet. Sometimes, I'm even grateful to the me of then who left a snapshot for the me of now. Maybe I should let go and join those who pretend the past is past, but it's a falsehood I've never learned to spin. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan

How many snapshots in the world were actually just-after shots, the moment that elicited the shooter to press the button never captured; instead, the detritus just following, the laughter, the reaction, the ripples. ~ Reif Larsen

They were just snapshots, nothing special, nothing particularly artistic. They were used for utility purposes. (On photographs of mundane streetscapes he had Stanley Something-or-other take in Sacramento in 1988 to serve as backgrounds to his cartoons. People don't draw it, all this crap, people don't focus attention on it because it's ugly, it's bleak, it's depressing ... But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life. ) ~ Robert Crumb

1915. The year itself looks sepia and soiled-muddied like its pictures. In the snapshots everyone at first seems timid-lost-irresolute. Boys and men squinting at the camera. ~ Timothy Findley

Businesses and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get resolved. ~ Peter Senge

I always consider every album to be a snapshot. ~ DJ Shadow

In the '70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. Color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography. ~ Martin Parr

I couldn't find any good pictures in magazines of ordinary modern street corners in America, so I persuaded this guy I knew in Sacramento - Stanley Something-or-other - to spend a day with me driving around just to take snapshots. ~ Robert Crumb

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash. ~ Adrienne Rich

The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me
snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting
you were beautiful; goodbye,
Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain
brown envelopes for the return of your very
"Clinical Sonnets"; goodbye, manufacturer
of brassieres on the Coast, whose eclogues
give the fullest treatment in literature yet
to the sagging breast motif; goodbye, you in San Quentin,
who wrote, "Being German my hero is Hitler,"
instead of "Sincerely yours," at the end of long,
neat-scripted letters extolling the Pre-Raphaelites:

I swear to you, it was just my way
of cheering myself up, as I licked
the stamped, self-addressed envelopes,
the game I had of trying to guess
which one of you, this time,
had poisoned his glue. I did care.
I did read each poem entire.
I did say everything I thought
in the mildest words I knew. And now,
in this poem, or chopped prose, no better,
I realize, than those troubled lines
I kept sending back to you,
I have to say I am relieved it is over:
at the end I could feel only pity
for that urge toward more life
your poems kept smothering in words, the smell
of which, days later, tingled in your nostrils
as new, God-given impulses
to write.

Goodbye,
you who are, for me, the postmar ~ Galway Kinnell

Business and human endeavors are systems ... we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved. ~ Peter M. Senge

I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots. ~ Edmund White