Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused.
— Alan Cohen
Astounding Broken Images quotations
Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to a world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion.

Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and LOVE YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It was never broken.

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the plowman, splashing the wintry mold, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
God reminded me how beautiful we all are to Him, after all, we were created in His own image, and He looks at me, at you, in all our sweat and dirt and brokenness, and says, "I choose you. You are beautiful.
Because a God who is ultimately most focused on his own glory will be about the business of restoring us, who are all broken images of him. His glory demands it. So we should be thankful for a self-sufficient God whose self-regard is glorious.

For you know only a heap of broken images
Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes They call me on and on across the universe Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe
I have no urns, no dusty monuments; No broken images of ancestors, Wanting an ear, or nose; no forged tales Of long descents, to boast false honors from.

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon them.
Broken vows are like broken mirrors. They leave those who held to them bleeding and staring at fractured images of themselves.
With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping homeliness entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all sentiment is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called the Public, the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.

MAD FREE is simply described as "Liberating Conversations with Revolutionary Women about Beauty, Image and Power". It began as a Salon series in NY loft in Brooklyn as a salve to my broken heart after Honey Magazine folded. It was not because of the readership or because the market wasn't there; the company that held it collapsed, which I was the last editor in chief of.
We can have our hearts broken over so much more.
It is important to recognize the full spectrum of heartbreak. We can be heartbroken by lost and by disappointment. But heartbreak is not just this negative image we see, it's not this terrible experience that brings no benefits.
The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.
... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus.

A book becomes a mirror, with the author's face shining over it.
Talent only gives an imperfect image,--the broken glimmer of a countenance. But the features of genius remain unruffled. Time guards the shadow. Beauty, the spiritual, Venus,--whose children are the Tassos, the Spensers, the Bacons,--breathes, the magic of her love, and fixes the face forever.
The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one.
It was cracked in a double sense -- it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream.
In the face of nature's overwhelming forces, humans needed a God who would protect them from harm. When they felt that they had broken the law or committed wrongdoing, people turned to a God who would judge them on the one hand and redeem their sins on the other. In this way, purely from slef-interest, the project of creating God in our own image proceeded--and continues to proceed.

God makes it clear that his image bearers must live in dynamic communion with one another, thereby discovering and celebrating the good gift of one's own gender and that of the other. With a cross-shaped lens, we behold the beauty of man for woman and woman for man. None of us has ever lost that original design. No matter how broken we have become, we have never lost the potential to be good gifts for others!
Sleep doesn't come easy when a broken twig conjures images of a hulking mental patient snapping the arms off children, over by the bin.
With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping homeliness entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all sentiment is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called the Public, the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.

In an old song the Mother sings: 'My sleeping is my dreaming, my dreaming is my thinking, my thinking is my wisdom.' She is the bed we are born in, in which we sleep and dream, where we are healed, love and die. In her wisdom we remember day's broken images and carry them down into dreams where their motions roll into shadows and root, growing into stories.
Broken Horses is an artistic triumph.
Beautifully written, acted and imaged, this film wraps slowly around you like a king snake and squeezes.
I'd always admired writers. I'd always loved words on a page. Somehow, words seemed to bypass image and get straight to the heart of things. Somehow, words seemed big enough to contain pain, and sentences could pull broken bits together.

What I do now is all my dad's fault, because he bought me a guitar as a boy, for no apparent reason. ... I wrote some of my best love songs ever when I was unhappy and my saddest love songs when I was very much in love. When I wrote 'You're in My Heart', which is an uplifting song, I had just broken up with-Now who had I broken up with?. ... Half the battle is selling music, not singing it. It's the image, not what you sing.
I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together. But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.
The author squares man's depravity with still being made in the image of God with this word picture. A vase that has held beautiful roses though now broken, will nevertheless hold something of the fragrance it once contained.

Qhuinn's eyes shifted away from his buddy--and just happened to measure the distance down to the stone patio below. Hmm . . . doing a swan dive onto all that slate might just get the images of those two out of his head... of course, it would also turn his brain into scrambled eggs, but really, was that such a bad thing?
Every child, every person needs to know that they are a source of joy;
every child, every person, needs to be celebrated. Only when all of our weaknesses are accepted as part of our humanity can our negative, broken self-images be transformed.
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.