Ash Tray Quotes

Nothing lasts forever,' I said, flicking cigarette ash into a cut-glass tray. 'We all have a short time, to shine or just survive.

Much as I like reasonable persons, I hate completely rational beings. For that reason, I am always scared and ill at ease when I enter a house in which there are no ash trays.

If ash-trays could speak, sir.' 'Indeed, yes.

We were convinced that she looked on with indifference if she noticed us at all. Today I know that everything watches, that nothing goes unseen, and that even wallpaper has a better memory than ours. It isn't God in His heaven that sees all. A kitchen chair, a coathanger, a half-filled ash tray, or the wooden replica of a woman named Niobe can perfectly well serve as an unforgetting witness to every one of our acts.

ON THE RETURN OF A BOOK LENT TO A FRIEND I GIVE humble and hearty thanks for the safe return of this book which having endured the perils of my friend's bookcase, and the bookcases of my friend's friends, now returns to me in reasonably good condition. I GIVE humble and hearty thanks that my friend did not see fit to give this book to his infant as a plaything, nor use it as an ash-tray for his burning cigar, nor as a teething-ring for his mastiff. WHEN I lent this book I deemed it as lost: I was resigned to the bitterness of the long parting: I never thought to look upon its pages again. BUT NOW that my book is come back to me, I rejoice and am exceeding glad! Bring hither the fatted morocco and let us rebind the volume and set it on the shelf of honour: for this my book was lent, and is returned again. PRESENTLY, therefore, I may return some of the books that I myself have borrowed.

Rule number one of anime," Simon said. He sat propped up against a pile of pillows at the foot of his bed, a bag of potato chips in one hand and the TV remote in the other. He was wearing a black T-shirt that said I BLOGGED YOUR MOM and a pair of jeans with a hole ripped in one knee. "Never screw with a blind monk." "I know," Clary said, taking a potato chip and dunking it into the can of dip balanced on the TV tray between them. "For some reason they're always way better fighters than monks who can see." She peered at the screen. "Are those guys dancing?" "That's not dancing. They're trying to kill each other. This is the guy who's the mortal enemy of the other guy, remember? He killed his dad. Why would they be dancing?

The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag's horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father's sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken ash-tray, a manuscript-book with his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging this new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: 'No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, but you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectations, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.

She took a puff, put the cigarette in the ashtray and stared at it. Without looking up, she said, But do you believe in love, Mr Evans? She rolled the cigarette end around in the ash tray. Do you? Outside, he thought, beyond this mountain and its snow, there was a world of countless millions of people. He could see them in their cities, in the heat and the light. And he could see this house, so remote and isolated, so far away, and he had a feeling that it once must have seemed to her and Jack, if only for a short time, like the universe with the two of them at its centre. And for a moment he was at the King of Cornwall with Amy in the room they thought of as theirs—with the sea and the sun and the shadows, with the white paint flaking off the French doors and with their rusty lock, with the breezes late of an afternoon and of a night the sound of the waves breaking—and he remembered how that too had once seemed the centre of the universe. I don’t, she said. No, I don’t. It’s too small a word, don’t you think, Mr Evans? I have a friend in Fern Tree who teaches piano. Very musical, she is. I’m tone-deaf myself. But one day she was telling me how every room has a note. You just have to find it. She started warbling away, up and down. And suddenly one note came back to us, just bounced back off the walls and rose from the floor and filled the place with this perfect hum. This beautiful sound. Like you’ve thrown a plum and an orchard comes back at you. You wouldn’t believe it, Mr Evans. These two completely different things, a note and a room, finding each other. It sounded … right. Am I being ridiculous? Do you think that’s what we mean by love, Mr Evans? The note that comes back to you? That finds you even when you don’t want to be found? That one day you find someone, and everything they are comes back to you in a strange way that hums? That fits. That’s beautiful. I’m not explaining myself at all well, am I? she said. I’m not very good with words. But that’s what we were. Jack and me. We didn’t really know each other. I’m not sure if I liked everything about him. I suppose some things about me annoyed him. But I was that room and he was that note and now he’s gone. And everything is silent.

There were books everywhere. There were pens, and a blue glass vase, an ash tray from the Dolder Grand in Zürich, the rusted arrow of a weather vane, a little brass hourglass, sand dollars on the windowsill, a pair of binoculars, and empty wine bottle that served as a candle holder, wax melted down the neck. I touch this thing and that. At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions.

And I note here the little beat my heart once missed, in my home, when a fly, flying low above my ash-tray, raised a little ash, with the breath of its wings. And I grew gradually weaker and weaker and more and more content.

The restaurant was waning, indifferently relaxing its illusion: for the late-comers a private illusion took its place. Their table seemed to stand on their own carpet; they had a sensation of custom, sedateness, of being inside small walls, as though dining at home again after her journey. She told him about her Mount Morris solitary suppers, in the middle of the library, the rim of the tray just not touching the base of the lamp... the fire behind her back softly falling in on its own ash-no it had not been possible to feel lonely among those feeling things.

Men may perish, but the world will neither celebrate nor mourn. It will go on.' His smile thinned. 'Would you like to know how?' 'No.' 'Animals will swell to fill the void left by men," he told her. 'And over-swell it, perhaps. There will be other extinctions and other recoveries. The sky will clear, but those who see it will not marvel at its many colors. Those ruins will collapse, burying treasures like this-' He waved at the walls. '-and this-' He picked up the spoon from her coffee tray and tossed it down again with a clatter. '-forever, but the world will go on. Years become centuries so easily when no one is there to count them. Centuries become millennia. The forests will reclaim the lands that Men have razed. Rivers will carve canyons across the scars left by this fallen cities. Mountains will rise up, trapping seas to dry under and uncaring sun and leaving the bones of whales to bleach in the newborn deserts for no one to find, no one to be inspired by thoughts of giants and dragons. And still the worlds will go on, and I will go on with it through ages that can only be measured by the coming and going of glaciers. The stars themselves will shift in the heavens and no one will be there to invent names for their new alignments or remember the stories of the old ones, no one but me. In time, the sun itself will begin to cool. Here on Earth, the world goes on and on as its remaining life passes through its last changes and dies away. It will be quiet. And lonely.' His mouth curved into a bitter line. 'But I'll live.' 'Stop it,' Lan whispered through numb lips. 'I read once that the sun will someday swell and engulf this world before it burns itself out. Perhaps I will finally die with it. Or perhaps I' will continue to endure... my ashes pulled eternally apart through the frozen vacuum of space, and I with no more mouth to scream... still alive.

Why, Maddy asked herself lately, had she ever decided to have a baby? She wasn't ready for this, and neither was Peter. Very recently, it seemed, they had been staying up late and having lots of sex, and eating in a variety of cheap restaurants and going to many movies, and once even going to a tiny jewelry store on Avenue A on a Saturday night to have Maddy's nose pierced. Then, on a whim almost as casual as the nose-piercing decision, they had decided to stop using birth-control. She had taken her circular packet of pills one night, put them in an ash-tray, and ceremonially burned them, although the plastic had only curled and smoked and stank up the apartment, leaving the pills themselves intact behind their transparent bubble windows.

I remember Liz, her face white, delicate as an ash on the wind; her red lips staining the cigarette; her full breasts under the taut black jersey. She said to me, "But think how happy you can make a man someday." Yes, I'm thinking, and so far it's all right. But then I do a flipover and reach out in my mind to E., seeing a baseball game, maybe, perhaps watching television, or roaring with careless laughter at some dirty joke with the boys, beer cans lying about green and shiny gold, and ash trays. I spiral back to me, sitting here, swimming, drowning, sick with longing. I have too much conscience injected in me to break customs without disasterous effects; I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who can dispel sexual hunger freely, without misgiving, and be whole, while I drag out from date to date in soggy desire, always unfulfilled. The whole thing sickens me.

And thus by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company--in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one's kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat. If by good luck there had been an ash-tray handy, if one had not knocked the ash out of the window in default, if things had been a little different from what they were, one would not have seen, presumably, a cat without a tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me. It was as if someone had let fall a shade. Perhaps the excellent hock was relinquishing its hold. Certainly, as I watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed different. But what was lacking, what was different, I asked myself, listening to the talk? And to answer that question I had to think myself out of the room, back into the past, before the war indeed, and to set before my eyes the model of another luncheon party held in rooms not very far distant from these; but different. Everything was different.

It's strange,' said Wynand. 'I am the most offensively possessive man on earth. I do something to things. Let me pick up an ash tray from a dime-store counter, pay for it and put it in my pocket - and it becomes a special kind of ash tray, unlike any on earth, because it's mine. It's an extra quality in the thing, like a sort of halo. I feel that about everything I own.

Her cups—each unique—found homes in an old wooden sorting tray. I noticed one empty slot in what I’d remembered as a full rack. “You’re missing a cup?” Her fingers went to the empty slot in gentle caress. “It fell.

You can kill yourself or you can take a walk. You can kill yourself or you can play a game of cards with your demented grandmother. You can kill yourself or you can listen to your favorite song for the millionth time. You can kill yourself or you can day dream about your dream partner. You can fall into a pit of despair over the never ending failure and stupidity of the human species, or you can make a cup of coffee and spell the ash tray. The choice is yours, now if you'll excuse me, put the knife in the sink so I can do the dishes!

should be read in the Golden Future, some snowy evening by the fire after a home dinner à deux. Your predestined husband, mademoiselle, is to extend his god-like figure upon a sofa, with an ash-tray convenient. You are to do the reading, curled up in the big velvet wing-chair, with the lamp at your left elbow and the fender under your pretty feet.

It’s funny that I’m the one talking about helping Bert,” Victor said, “and not the other way around. I told you my grandfather came to America from Europe for a better life. My uncle died fighting communists in Poland. My dad worked for twenty-five years in an auto plant. He carried a lunch-pail every day. My mom worked part time at the five and ten. Bert’s uncles are big shots in various industries, his dad gives money to the art institute uptown. They’ve had money and position for generations. Bert wants to throw all that out and if he gets his way, no one else will ever have a chance. I used to think that the left....” Victor’s fingers trembled. Without paying attention to what he was doing, he put a spoonful of mashed potatoes into the ash tray with his pipe. “Why does he bother you?” Juliet asked. “You know his dreams will never come to pass. So does he.” She touched his hand. “It’s still warm. Let’s go outside. I’d like to look at the moon.” They walked to Lake Otrobe. The glow from a distant steel mill reddened the southern sky. “Industry,” Victor said admiringly. “Creating wealth.” He began to sputter again on the way back when they passed the apartment building where Bert lived. They looked up at a lighted window. A dark figure with his back to the street sat in a gray armchair, still, his head down. “He’s fallen asleep reading,” Victor mumbled. “Engels no doubt or Lenin or one of those other thieves.

the earth looks shiny wrapped in steam and ermine tired of us perspiring at every chance on the floor below I bring you an ash tray out of love for the ice palace because it is the end of summer the end of the sun because you are in season like a blue rug you are my favorite violin when you sit and peel my eyes with your great surfaces seem intimate when we merely touch the thread of life and kiss

Back to the furniture. Sometime while the things were in storage someone helped themselves to 6 teaspoons and a tablespoon, 3 strings of Xmas tree lights and the metal ash tray we got from Raleigh cigarette coupons. I think it was a pretty low trick but we have no claim on things inside drawers because they weren’t listed on the contract.

We received two sets of silver plated tea spoons, a few ash trays, a few egg-cups. As we had no furniture, the uncles' gift of fifty Israeli pounds was intended for the purchase of a piece of furniture, a clothes wardrobe. After the meal, after receiving all their good wishes and blessings, the guests all went home. The out-of-towners left on a bus and the newly weds? We walked about five minutes to our furnished room and started our new life together. The wedding was simple, a short ceremony in a new town, among a few people, whom I hardly knew, far away from my entire family, no friends present, nobody giving away the bride, no honeymoon, no real home to go to.

Deduction. You smoke Benson and Hedges Virginia cigarettes. They leave a firm ash that keeps its shape. An ashtray at his house had enough of those little gray rolls to account for at least two cigarettes. But no stubs in the tray. Because you smoke them in a holder and a stub from a holder looks different. So you removed the stubs. Like it?” “No.” His voice was quiet. He looked down at the floor again.

Literature was a form of intoxication, and many nights he read and wrote in his tower room till the cigarette butts littered the ash trays -- then wandered up to Nassau Street through the darkened campus for string potatoes and milk at Joe's.

The truth was undeniable now. Ash had been lured into the spiders’ web, and now he found himself at the center of delicately woven conspiracy. A sham sandwich, indeed. One that sat on a tray of lies.

Harry reached the vehicle and stopped. Violet climbed off his back like a lank-limbed gibbon and slid onto the front seat. Tex pushed himself back against the frame of the vehicle and his feet backpedaled even though there was nowhere else to go. “Relax, sweetie,” she purred in her gravelly voice that sounded as if her larynx had been marinated in an ash tray. “Y-you’re what they were keeping hidden here, aren’t you?” “Got that right. But I don’t bite.” Violet set a hand on Tex’ leg and exhaled a cloud of smoke from the corner of her mouth. She raised a slender black eyebrow and pinioned him to his seat with her eyes. “I breathe fire.

A poem-shaped space, I thought. A poem-shaped space. I tried to hold a poem-shaped space in my mind. Sometimes the work of life is like preparing a bedroom for a guest: sweeping the floor, emptying the ash-tray, watering the sloping aloe plant. Opening the window wide to let new air in. I did all this inside my head, behind my eyes, while my fingers made words appear and waited for that guest to arrive.

The light came from the window of a pawnshop. The shop was closed, but a glaring bulb hung there to discourage looters who might be reduced to this. He stopped and looked at it. He thought, the most indecent sight on earth, a pawnshop window. The things which had been sacred to men, and the things which had been precious, surrendered to the sight of all, to the pawing and the bargaining, trash to the indifferent eyes of strangers, the equality of a junk heap, typewriters and violins-the tools of dreams, old photographs and wedding rings-the tags of love, together with soiled trousers, coffee pots, ash trays, pornographic plaster figures; the refuse of despair, pledge, not sold, not cut off in clean finality, but hocked to a stillborn hope, never to be redeemed. 'Hello, Gail Wynand,' he said to the things in the window, and walked on.

Mr. Bodley was already tottering toward them under the weight of a tea tray laden with seedcake, sponge cake, strawberry jam, marmalade, hot buttered crumpets in a basket wrapped in white linen, scones, clotted cream, almond biscuits, sardines on toast, a pot of beans baked with bacon and onion, a plate of sliced ham with gherkins, a bottle of brandy with two glasses, and—perhaps as an afterthought—a steaming teapot with two china cups and saucers alongside.

As a soubrette, yes. But as Lady Macbeth—” Mr Keane made an expressive gesture which swept an ash tray off the table.

(She picks up sugar bowls, ash trays, and tea pots because she can make them something else.) 'It depends on how much I had to hurt myself while I made it, how far I had to drag it, whether it was night or day. Mostly, I make it up," she says. ''It's a made-up price for made-up stuff in a made-up world.

However, I just feel that I must have a few months of London first, after the dreadful time I’ve been through since 1939. I never touch chocolate biscuits,” she added, waving an impatient hand as Reeny set the tray in front of the guest, on a coffin stool, from which she had carefully removed a used ash-tray and a packet of outsize envelopes. “Thank you, nurse,” said Mary. “You may take away the biscuits.” When the door closed behind the abashed Reeny, “Why have you had a more dreadful time than anyone else since 1939?” she inquired.

When the police found Brynn that fall, Adam had no explanation. Shattered wrists, sunken face, and a broken leg – it was never clear what had happened. Bailey found her at the bottom of the stairs and called for help. Adam sat in the parlor, tipping cigarillo ash into the glass tray. Though the charges for assault were dismissed due to lack of evidence, Bailey couldn’t escape her suspicions, and by Christmas, she moved away. The divorce papers arrived in the mailbox, crinkled and brief. Adam pulled them from the box and walked toward the house. Looking up, he was sure he saw something falling from the sky.