We investigate the problem of Language-Based Image Editing (LBIE) in this work. Given a source image and a natural language description, we want to generate a target image by editing the source im- age based on the description. We propose a generic modeling framework for two sub-tasks of LBIE: language-based image segmentation and image colorization. The framework uses recurrent attentive models to fuse image and language features. Instead of using a fixed step size, we introduce for each region of the image a termination gate to dynamically determine in each inference step whether to continue extrapolating additional information from the textual description. The effectiveness of the framework has been validated on three datasets. First, we introduce a synthetic dataset, called CoSaL, to evaluate the end-to-end performance of our LBIE system. Second, we show that the framework leads to state-of-the- art performance on image segmentation on the ReferIt dataset. Third, we present the first language-based colorization result on the Oxford-102 Flowers dataset, laying the foundation for future research.