Billiards Table Quotes

Relegated as he was to a corner and as though sheltered behind the billiard table, the soldiers, their eyes fixed upon Enjolras, had not even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat the order: 'Take aim!' when suddenly they heard a powerful voice cry out beside them, 'Vive la Republique! Count me in.' Grantaire was on his feet. The immense glare of the whole combat he had missed and in which he had not been, appeared in the flashing eyes of the transfigured drunkard. He repeated, 'Vive la Republique!' crossed the room firmly, and took his place in front of the muskets beside Enjolras. 'Two at one shot,' he said. And, turning toward Enjolras gently, he said to him, 'Will you permit it?' Enjolras shook his hand with a smile. The smile had not finished before the report was heard. Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained backed up against the wall is if the bullets had nailed him there. Except that his head was tilted. Grantaire, struck down, collapsed at his feet.

Subject: Sundown Date: June 14 2011 09:35 To: Christian Grey Dear Completely & Utterly Smitten I love waking up with you, too. But I love being in bed with you and in elevators and on pianos and billiard tables and boats and desks and showers and bathtubs and strange wooden crosses with shackles and four poster beds with red satin sheets and boathouses and childhood bedrooms. Yours Sex Mad and Insatiable xx

Death exists--in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table--and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

To: Christian Grey Dear Completely & Utterly Smitten I love waking up to you, too. But I love being in bed with you and in elevators and on pianos and billiard tables and boats and desks and showers and bathtubs and strange wooden crosses with shackels and four-poster beds with red satin sheets and boathouses and childhood bedrooms.

It seemed to work at first. I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot-of-air kind of thing. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this: Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. Translate into words, it's a cliche, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust. Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there. The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that... I lived through the following spring...with that kind knot of air in my chest, but I struggled all the while against becoming serious. Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching truth, I sensed, however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles...In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother's, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player's arm movement.

I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare of perfection, the still, unshakeable dream in the midst of frenzied activity, the random shot on the white billiard table of logic, I shall know neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall be there always in absolute silence to receive and to restore.

Relegated, as he was, to one corner, and sheltered behind the billiard-table, the soldiers whose eyes were fixed on Enjolras, had not even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat his order: "Take aim!" when all at once, they heard a strong voice shout beside them: "Long live the Republic! I'm one of them." Grantaire had risen. The immense gleam of the whole combat which he had missed, and in which he had had no part, appeared in the brilliant glance of the transfigured drunken man. He repeated: "Long live the Republic!" crossed the room with a firm stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside Enjolras. "Finish both of us at one blow," said he. And turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him: "Do you permit it?" Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile. This smile was not ended when the report resounded. Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained leaning against the wall, as though the balls had nailed him there. Only, his head was bowed. Grantaire fell at his feet, as though struck by a thunderbolt.

Wait till you see her. Sort of woman who makes you feel that your hands are the color of a frightful tomato and the size of a billiard table, if you know what I mean.

The billiard table is better than the doctor.

It was more wonderful than making love with a negro boxer on Mr Singer’s billiard table.

I had walked over to the window and was looking down at the rails of the Montmartre funicular, the gardens of the Sacré Cœur and, further off, the whole of Paris, with its lights, its roofs, its shadows. Denise Coudreuse and I had met one day in this maze of roads and boulevards. Paths that cross, among those of thousands and thousands of people all over Paris, like countless little balls on a gigantic, electric billiard table, which occasionally bump into each other. And nothing remained of this, not even the luminous trail a firefly leaves behind it.

I had concluded that I no longer shared her faith in a God who controlled the universe like a puppet master pulling and tugging strings and making us all dance. Our lives, I believed, were more like billiard balls on a pool table, ricocheting randomly with the impact of the cue ball. To believe otherwise was to believe that a God to whom my mother had devoted her life had responded by striking down her husband and causing her so much pain. I couldn’t accept that.

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. Translated into words, it’s a cliché, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists—in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table—and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

He remembered meeting her in the park, and how he had thought her conversation seemed like a careless spray of diamonds on the green felt of a billiard table. Since yesterday afternoon it had seemed more like the glitter of zircons, near-perfect pastes that were, after all, only pastes.

He thought of nothing. Some thoughts or fragments of thoughts, some images without order or coherence floated before his mind--faces of people he had seen in his childhood or met somewhere once, whom he would never have recalled, the belfry of the church at V., the billiard table in a restaurant and some officers playing billiards, the smell of cigars in some underground tobacco shop, a tavern room, a back staircase quite dark, all sloppy with dirty water and strewn with egg-shells, and the Sunday bells floating in from somewhere.... The images followed one another, whirling like a hurricane. Some of them he liked and tried to clutch at, but they faded and all the while there was an oppression within him, but it was not overwhelming, sometimes it was even pleasant.... The slight shivering still persisted, but that too was an almost pleasant sensation.

Business idea: Merge a billiard table with a golf course, and make the pockets as deep as a typical politician's pants.

The felt on my pool table is blue, so it looks like a pool. I like to shoot billiards with my duck sitting on the table, because swimming is better with no possibility of drowning.

Pool tables should have contours, like golf courses. For a novice billiards player, I have a pretty good swing.

Billiards doesn’t have to end. A game of billiards could last for ever, even if you were losing all the time. I don’t like things to end.

Her continued devotion in the face of all that had happened amazed me, but at this point I had concluded that I no longer shared her faith in a God who controlled the universe like a puppet master pulling and tugging strings and making us all dance. Our lives, I believed, were more like billiard balls on a pool table, ricocheting randomly with the impact of the cue ball.

I like mini-golf. For me, it’s like long-billiards, where the green has contours, and the table is the floor. This putt-putt course is dilapidated, but that just makes it more challenging.

Golf. A golf man. Is my tone communicating the contempt? Billiards on a big table, Jim. A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod. A quote unquote sport. Anal rage and checkered berets.

An officer put me in my place from the first moment. I was standing by the billiard-table and in my ignorance blocking up the way, and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and without a word--without a warning or explanation--moved me from where I was standing to another spot and passed by as though he had not noticed me. I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me.

I once sold shoes. They were Buy One, Get One FREE. Then I met a customer with only one foot, and now I have an extra shoe. So, I filled it with duck eggs, because I ran out of room in the six pockets of my pool table.

perspective of Beacon Street, with its double chain of lamps, was a foreshortened desert.  The club on the hill alone, from its semi-cylindrical front, projected a glow upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in the hot stillness the click of a pair of billiard-balls.  As “every one” was out of town perhaps the servants, in the extravagance of their leisure, were profaning the tables.  The heat was insufferable and I thought with

After Evie had finished her plate, Sebastian tugged her to the billiards table and handed her a cue stick with a leather tip. Ignoring her attempts to refuse him, he proceeded to instruct her in the basics of the game. “Don’t try to claim this is too scandalous for you,” he told her with mock severity. “After running off with me to Gretna Green, nothing is beyond you. Certainly not one little billiards game. Bend over the table.” She complied awkwardly, flushing as she felt him lean over her, his body forming an exciting masculine cage as his hands arranged hers on the cue stick. “Now,” she heard him say, “curl your index finger around the tip of the shaft. That’s right. Don’t grip so tightly, sweet…let your hand relax. Perfect.” His head was close to hers, the light scent of sandalwood cologne rising from his warm skin. “Try to imagine a path between the cue ball—that’s the white one—and the colored ball. You’ll want to strike right about there”—he pointed to a place just above center on the cue ball—“to send the object ball into the side pocket. It’s a straight-on shot, you see? Lower your head a bit. Draw the cue stick back and try to strike in a smooth motion.” Attempting the shot, Evie felt the tip of the cue stick fail to make proper contact with the white ball, sending it spinning clumsily off to the side of the table. “A miscue,” Sebastian remarked, deftly catching the cue ball in his hand and repositioning it. “Whenever that happens, reach for more chalk, and apply it to the tip of the cue stick while looking thoughtful. Always imply that your equipment is to blame, rather than your skills.” Evie felt a smile rising to her lips, and she leaned over the table once more. Perhaps it was wrong, with her father having passed away so recently, but for the first time in a long while, she was having fun. Sebastian covered her from behind again, sliding his hands over hers. “Let me show you the proper motion of the cue stick—keep it level—like this.” Together they concentrated on the steady, even slide of the cue stick through the little circle Evie had made of her fingers. The sexual entendre of the motion could hardly escape her, and she felt a flush rise up from the neck of her gown. “Shame on you,” she heard him murmur. “No proper young woman would have such thoughts.” A helpless giggle escaped Evie’s lips, and Sebastian moved to the side, watching her with a lazy smile. “Try again.

Lord Bourne knows precisely where I've been and with whom for the duration of our short, disastrous marriage." She stepped toward Michael, her offense making her bold. "Home, alone. Instead of here, where the female half of London is apparently wishing they had the password to his bed." His eyes went wide. "I would appreciate it if you would leave, Michael," she added, tossing the mask and the rose to the billiard table. "You see, I've been looking forward to this billiards lesson. And you are making it very difficult to enjoy.

He wasn't thinking about anything. There was just the odd random thought or scrap of thought, or the odd image without rhyme or reason: faces seen by him back in his childhood or people he'd seen only once and would never have recalled again; the bell tower of V______ Church; a billiard table in a tavern and some officer standing next to it; the smell of cigars in some basement tobacco shop; a drinking den; a back staircase, pitch dark, soaked in slops and spattered with eggshells; and from somewhere or other the ringing of Sunday bells . . .

Gabe watched her move to the center of the green. In one gloved hand, she clutched a leash. The other end of the leash was attached to... something furry and brown that rolled. "What is that?" "That would be mongrel with two lamed hind legs. Apparently, Her Ladyship's friend devised a little chariot for his rear half, and the dog careens around the neighborhood like a yapping billiard ball. If you think that's strange, wait until you see the goat." "Hold a moment. There's a goat?" "Oh, yes. She grazes it on the square every afternoon. Doesn't precisely elevate the atmosphere of Bloom Square, now does it?" "I see the problem." "I'm only getting started. Her Ladyship has single-handedly set us back a month on the improvements." Hammond pulled a collection of letters from a folio. He held one aloft and read from it. "'Dear Mr. Hammond, I must request that you delay completion of the parquet flooring. The fumes from the lacquer are dizzying the hens. Sincerely yours, Lady Penelope Campion.'" He withdrew another. "'Dear Mr. Hammond, I'm afraid your improvements to the mews must be temporarily halted. I've located a litter of newborn kittens in the hayloft. Their mother is looking after them, but as their eyes are not yet open, they should not be displaced for another week. Thank you for your cooperation. Gratefully yours, Lady Penelope Campion.'" Gabe sensed a theme. "Oh, and here's my favorite." Hammond shook open a letter and cleared his throat for dramatic effect. "'Dear Mr. Hammond, if it is not too great an imposition, might I ask that your workers refrain from performing heavy labor between nine o'clock in the morning and half-three in the afternoon? Hedgehogs are nocturnal animals, and sensitive to loud noises. My dear Freya is losing quills. I feel certain this will concern you as much as it does me. Neighborly yours, Lady Penelope Campion.'" He tossed the folio of letters onto the table, where they landed with a smack. "Her hedgehog. Really.

The rock there is described as “blue-gray true unfading slate.” It is strong but “soft,” and will accept a polishing that makes it smoother than glass. From Memphis to St. Joe, from Joplin to River City, there is scarcely a hustler in the history of pool who has not racked up his runs over Martinsburg slate. For anybody alive who still hears corruption in the click of pocket billiards, it is worth a moment of reflection that not only did all those pool tables accumulate on the ocean floor as Ordovician guck but so did the blackboards in the schools of all America.

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. Translate into words, it's a cliche, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

Loser" "Father directed choir. When it paused on a Sunday, he liked to loiter out morning with the girls; then back to our cottage, dinner cold on the table, Mother locked in bed devouring tabloid. You should see him, white fringe about his ears, bald head more biased than a billiard ball-- he never left a party. Mother left by herself-- I threw myself from her car and broke my leg.... Years later, he said, 'How jolly of you to have jumped.' He forgot me, mother replaced his name, I miss him. When I am unhappy, I try to squeeze the hour an hour or half-hour smaller than it is; orphaned, I wake at midnight and pray for day-- the lovely ladies get me through the day

He smiled vaguely. Her wit seemed forced this morning, as it had all yesterday afternoon. He remembered meeting her in the park, and how he had thought her conversation seemed like a careless spray of diamonds on the green felt of a billiard table. Since yesterday afternoon it had seemed more like the glitter of zircons, near-perfect pastes that were, after all, only pastes.

Death exists -- in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table -- and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust. Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to be the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is there. I am here, not over there. The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, in my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it took the seventeen-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.

Death exists -- in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table -- and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust. Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to be the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is there. I am here, not over there. The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, in my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it took the seventeen-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.

Lying in a position of classic repose, Winnifred had never been more beautiful. Her silvery gold hair cascaded over the oaken door upon which she lay. A bright waterfall, it pooled on the deep green felt of the billiard table where the door rested. Her sightless blue eyes stared up at the plastered ceiling, her face a study in serenity and peace. I had never seen violent death leave a corpse so lovely.

The stale air, the incessant, inane clatter of the billiard balls, the perpetual hacking cough of a half-blind journalist opposite me, the spindle-shanked infantry officer, alternately picking his nose or combing his moustache with nicotine-stained fingers in front of a small pocket-mirror, the seething clump of vile, sweaty, gabbling Italians round the card table in the corner, now rapping their knuckles and squawking as they played their trumps, now hawking up a lump of phlegm and spewing it onto the floor: all that was bad enough, but to see it reflected two, three times over in the mirrors on the walls! It slowly sucked the blood out of my veins.

Moody blinked and looked around him. Balfour’s narrative, disjunctive and chaotic as it was, had indeed accounted for the presence of every man in the room. There by the window was the Maori man, Te Rau Tauwhare, who had been Crosbie’s loyal friend in life, though he had unwittingly betrayed him at the last. There in the farthest corner was Charlie Frost, the banker who had engineered the sale of Wells’s house and land, and opposite him, the newspaperman Benjamin Löwenthal, who had heard about the death within mere hours of its occurrence. Edgar Clinch, purchaser of Wells’s estate, was sitting on the sofa beside the billiard table, smoothing his mustache with his finger and thumb.

Forget about green-felt pool tables and red N-360s and white flowers on school desks; about smoke rising from tall crematorium smokestacks, and chunky paperweights in police interrogation rooms. Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust. I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles.

driving through the park I notice men and women playing golf driving in their powered carts over billiard table lawns, they are my age but their bodies are fat their hair grey their faces waffle batter, and I remember being startled by my own face scarred, and mean as red ants looking at me from a department store mirror and the eyes mad mad mad I drive on and start singing making up the sound a war chant and there is the sun and the sun says, good, I know you, and the steering wheel is humorous and the dashboard laughs, see, the whole sky knows I have not lied to anything even death will have exits like a dark theatre. I stop at a stop sign and as fire burns the trees and the people and the city I know that there will be a place to go and a way to go and nothing need ever be lost.

He had come to us only three years earlier, but had already won general sympathy, mainly because he “knew how to bring society together.” His house was never without guests, and it seemed he would have been unable to live without them. He had to have guests to dinner every day, even if only two, even if only one, but without guests he would not sit down to eat. He gave formal dinners, too, under all sorts of pretexts, sometimes even the most unexpected. The food he served, though not refined, was abundant, the cabbage pies were excellent, and the wines made up in quantity for what they lacked in quality. In the front room stood a billiard table, surrounded by quite decent furnishings; that is, there were even paintings of English racehorses in black frames on the walls, which, as everyone knows, constitute a necessary adornment of any billiard room in a bachelor’s house.

There was only one thing for me to do when I started my new life in the dorm: stop taking everything so seriously; establish a proper distance between myself and everything else. Forget about green-felt pool tables and red N-360s and white flowers on school desks; about smoke rising from tall crematorium smokestacks, and chunky paperweights in police interrogation rooms. It seemed to work at first. I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot-of-air kind of thing. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simple form, a form that I am able to put into words, like this: Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. Translated into words, it’s a cliché, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists—in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table—and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

This is a billiard table. An easy, flat, green billiard table. And you have hit your white ball, and it is travelling easily and quietly towards the red. The pocket is alongside. Fatally, inevitably, you are going to hit the red and the red is going into that pocket. It is the law of the billiard table, the law of the billiard room. But, outside the orbit of these things, a jet pilot has fainted, and his plane is diving straight at that billiard room, or a gas main is about to explode, or lighting is about to strike. And the building collapses on top of you and on top of the billiard table Then what has happed to that white ball that could not miss the red ball, and to the red ball that could not miss the pocket? The white ball could not miss cording to the laws of the billiard table. But the laws of the billiard table are not the only laws, and the law governing the progress of this train, and of you to your destination are also not the only laws in this particular game.

Two nights after the Chaworth ball, Gabriel practiced at the billiards table in the private apartments above Jenner's. The luxurious rooms, which had once been occupied by his parents in the earlier days of their marriage, were now reserved for the convenience of the Challon family. Raphael, one of his younger brothers, usually lived at the club, but at the moment was on an overseas trip to America. He'd gone to source and purchase a large quantity of dressed pine timber on behalf of a Challon-owned railway construction company. American pine, for its toughness and elasticity, was used as transom ties for railways, and it was in high demand now that native British timber was in scarce supply. The club wasn't the same without Raphael's carefree presence, but spending time alone here was better than the well-ordered quietness of his terrace at Queen's Gate. Gabriel relished the comfortably masculine atmosphere, spiced with scents of expensive liquor, pipe smoke, oiled Morocco leather upholstery, and the acrid pungency of green baize cloth. The fragrance never failed to remind him of the occasions in his youth when he had accompanied his father to the club. For years, the duke had gone almost weekly to Jenner's to meet with managers and look over the account ledgers. His wife Evie had inherited it from her father, Ivo Jenner, a former professional boxer. The club was an inexhaustible financial engine, its vast profits having enabled the duke to improve his agricultural estates and properties, and accumulate a sprawling empire of investments. Gaming was against the law, of course, but half of Parliament were members of Jenner's, which had made it virtually exempt from prosecution. Visiting Jenner's with his father had been exciting for a sheltered boy. There had always been new things to see and learn, and the men Gabriel had encountered were very different from the respectable servants and tenants on the estate. The patrons and staff at the club had used coarse language and told bawdy jokes, and taught him card tricks and flourishes. Sometimes Gabriel had perched on a tall stool at a circular hazard table to watch high-stakes play, with his father's arm draped casually across his shoulders. Tucked safely against the duke's side, Gabriel had seen men win or lose entire fortunes in a single night, all on the tumble of dice.

Only as a young man playing pool all night for money had he been able to find what he wanted in life, and then only briefly. People thought pool hustling was corrupt and sleazy, worse than boxing. But to win at pool, to be a professional at it, you had to deliver. In a business you could pretend that skill and determination had brought you along, when it had only been luck and muddle. A pool hustler did not have the freedom to believe that. There were well-paid incompetents everywhere living rich lives. They arrogated to themselves the plush hotel suites and Lear Jets that America provided for the guileful and lucky far more than it did for the wise. You could fake and bluff and luck your way into all of it. Hotel suites overlooking Caribbean private beaches. Bl*wj*bs from women of stunning beauty. Restaurant meals that it took four tuxedoed waiters to serve, with the sauces just right. The lamb or duck in tureen sliced with precise and elegant thinness, sitting just so on the plate, the plate facing you just so on the heavy white linen, the silver fork heavy gleaming in your manicured hand below the broad cloth cuff and mother of pearl buttons. You could get that from luck and deceit even while causing the business or the army or the government that supported you to do poorly at what it did. The world and all its enterprises could slide downhill through stupidity and bad faith. But the long gray limousines would still hum through the streets of New York, of Paris, of Moscow, of Tokyo. Though the men who sat against the soft leather in back with their glasses of 12-year-old scotch might be incapable of anything more than looking important, of wearing the clothes and the hair cuts and the gestures that the world, whether it liked to or not, paid for, and always had paid for. Eddie would lie in bed sometimes at night and think these things in anger, knowing that beneath the anger envy lay like a swamp. A pool hustler had to do what he claimed to be able to do. The risks he took were not underwritten. His skill on the arena of green cloth, cloth that was itself the color of money, could never be only pretense. Pool players were often cheats and liars, petty men whose lives were filled with pretensions, who ran out on their women and walked away from their debts. But on the table with the lights overhead beneath the cigarette smoke and the silent crowd around them in whatever dive of a billiard parlor at four in the morning, they had to find the wherewithal inside themselves to do more than promise excellence. Under whatever lies might fill the life, the excellence had to be there, it had to be delivered. It could not be faked. But Eddie did not make his living that way anymore.

presidential campaign between Jackson and Adams had been vicious. Jackson’s forces had charged that Adams, as minister to Russia, had procured a woman for Czar Alexander I. As president, Adams was alleged to have spent too much public money decorating the White House, buying fancy china and a billiard table. The anti-Jackson assaults were more colorful. Jackson’s foes called his wife a bigamist and his mother a whore, attacking him for a history of dueling, for alleged atrocities in battles against the British, the Spanish, and the Indians—and for being a wife stealer who had married Rachel before she

Gentlemen," Lily informed the room at large, "I came to tell you I must abandon the game to show my new guest 'round the house. Lansdale, perhaps you would take my place at the table?" "He will, but not half so attractively," someone remarked. There were assorted chuckles around the room. Lansdale, a middle-aged man of unusually short stature but possessing a handsome aquiline face, regarded Sara with bold interest. "Perhaps, Lady Raiford, you would keep to the billiards game and allow me to show your guest around." Sara blushed at the suggestion, while several of the men laughed. Rolling her eyes, Lily addressed a remark to Sara. "Watch out for that one, my lamb. In fact, don't trust a single of these men. I know them all, and I can vouch for the fact that underneath those attractive exteriors is a pack of wolves." Sara could see how Lily's remark pleased the men, who clearly liked to think of themselves as predators, paunches and receding hairlines notwithstanding.

Something about the fraternal atmosphere of a billiards hall reassured the soul. The isolated pool of light over a table of green felt was an indoor hydroponic zone where what grew was the prickly plant of masculine emotion, too sensitive for sunlight and fresh air.

the following simple exercise concerning the prediction of the movements of billiard balls on a table. I use the example as computed by the mathematician Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic parameters concerning the ball at rest, can compute the resistance of the table (quite elementary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to predict what would happen at the first hit. The second impact becomes more complicated, but possible; you need to be more careful about your knowledge of the initial states, and more precision is called for. The problem is that to correctly compute the ninth impact, you need to take into account the gravitational pull of someone standing next to the table (modestly, Berry’s computations use a weight of less than 150 pounds). And to compute the fifty-sixth impact, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions!

No such suspension of disbelief was needed on the morning of 13 September 1645. If I had been looking south from my house, I would have seen an awesome sight. During the civil war fought all over Britain and Ireland, the Scottish army led by General David Leslie surprised the Royalists and the Marquis of Montrose at Philiphaugh, west of Selkirk. In the early morning mist, he sent about 2,000 cavalry troopers through our little valley, perhaps keeping to the metalled surface of the old road leading to Oakwood Fort. They moved quietly around Howden Hill and, while Leslie led the rest of his army in a frontal assault, the cavalry attacked the rear of the Royalists and scattered them. Philiphaugh was a savage, sadistic rout with much unnecessary slaughter excused by fundamentalist piety. The greater part of the landscape of the valley was much altered after 1645. The fields, the thorn hedges, the shelterbelts of hardwoods, the steadings, the big houses and their policies are not old. After the middle of the 18th century, the pace of agricultural improvement quickened and shaped much of the countryside we see now and believe to be traditional. One of the most important catalysts was drainage and below where I sit in the evening stretches the 35-acre Tile Field. It is billiard-table flat because it was scraped for clay and at the western end stood a tile works. Its kilns were fired by the trees of the Hartwood and the clay puddled in a pond formed by the Common Burn and the Hartwoodburn.

This is a billiard table. An easy, flat, green billiard table. And you have hit your white ball and it is travelling easily and quietly towards the red. The pocket is alongside. Fatally, inevitably, you are going to hit the red and the red is going into that pocket. It is the law of the billiard table, the law of the billiard room. But, outside the orbit of these things, a jet pilot has fainted and his plane is diving straight at that billiard room, or a gas main is about to explode, or lightning is about to strike. And the building collapses on top of you and on top of the billiard table. Then what has happened to that white ball that could not miss the red ball, and to the red ball that could not miss the pocket? The white ball could not miss according to the laws of the billiard table. But the laws of the billiard table are not the only laws, and the laws governing the progress of this train, and of you to your destination, are also not the only laws in this particular game.

Pausing at the threshold of the billiards room, she peered around the doorframe as gentlemen milled lazily around the table with drinks and cue sticks in hand. The clicks of ivory balls provided an arrhythmic undertone to the hum of masculine conversation. Her attention was caught by the sight of Matthew Swift in his shirtsleeves, leaning over the table to execute a perfect bank shot. His hands were deft on the cue stick, his blue eyes narrowed as he focused on the layout of balls on the table. Those ever-rebellious locks of hair had fallen over his forehead once more, and Daisy longed to push them back. As Swift sank a ball neatly into a side pocket, there was a scattering of applause, some low laughs, and a few coins changing hands. Standing, Swift produced one of his elusive grins and made a remark to his opponent, who turned out to be Lord Westcliff. Westcliff laughed at the comment and circled the table, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth as he considered his options. The air of relaxed masculine enjoyment in the room was unmistakable. As Westcliff rounded the table, he caught sight of Daisy peeking around the doorframe. He winked at her.

Wrath bared his fangs. “John, as God is my fucking witness, I will cut you if you don’t—” “Easy, there, big guy,” V gritted out. “I’m going to translate. You want to hit the library where we can—” “No, I want to fucking know where my shellan is!” Wrath boomed. John started signing, and whereas most of the time people translated half sentences sequentially, V waited until he’d finished the whole report. A couple of the Brothers muttered in the background as they shook their heads. “In the library,” V ordered the King in a way John never could have. “You’re gonna wanna do this in the library.” Wrong thing to say. Wrath wheeled on the Brother and went for him with such speed and accuracy no one was prepared: One minute V was standing next to the King; the next he was defending himself against an attack that was as unprovoked as it was . . . well, vicious. And then things went shit-wild. Like Wrath knew he was on the thin edge of a bad ledge, he broke off from V, and went total wrecking ball on the billiards room. The first thing he ran into was the pool table Butch was chilling next to—and there was barely any time for the cop to get that ashtray up off the side rails: Wrath grabbed the gunnels and flipped the thing like it was nothing but a card table, the mahogany and slate-topped behemoth flying up so high, it wiped out the hanging light fixture above, its weight so great it splintered the marble floor beneath on landing. Without missing a breath, the King EF5’d into his next victim . . . the heavy leather sofa that Rhage had just leaped up off. Talk about your couch-icopters. The entire thing came at John at about five feet off the floor, the pair of ends trading places as it spun around and around, cushions flying in all directions. He didn’t take it personally—especially as its mate do-si-doed with the bar, smashing the top-shelf bottles, liquor splashing all over the walls, the floor, the fire that was crackling in the hearth. Wrath wasn’t finished. The King picked up a side table, hauled it overhead, and pitched it in the direction of the TV. It missed the plasma screen, but managed to shatter an old-fashioned mirror—although the Sony didn’t last. The coffee table that had been in between the two sofas did that deed, killing the muted image of the two Boston guys and the old man from Southie with the baseball bat shilling for DirectTV. The Brothers just let Wrath go. It wasn’t that they were afraid of getting hurt. Hell, Rhage stepped in and caught the first couch before it tore a hunk off of the archway’s molding. They just weren’t stupid. Wrath - Beth x Overnight = Psycho-hose Beast

The second he caught her scent, he stopped. “Leelan! Are you sure you should be up?” Turned out the smell of the food was one hell of a distraction: the spike of hunger she got in response enough to halt her in her tracks. “Ah . . . yeah, I feel okay. I’m hungry, actually.” As well as scared to death. While the staff continued on into the billiards room, filing in past some sheets of heavy plastic, Wrath came over to the base of the stairs. “Let’s get you into the kitchen.” Heading all the way down to join him, she let him take her arm, and leaned into his strength, taking a deep, easing breath. She’d probably just imagined everything up there. Really. Probably. Crap. “You know, I slept well,” she murmured as if to reassure herself. Which didn’t work. “Yeah?” “Mm-hm.” Together, they walked past the long dining table, and went through the flap door in the far corner. On the other side, iAm was once again at the stove, stirring a great pot. The Shadow turned—and immediately frowned as he looked at her. “What?” She put her hands to her stomach. “What are you—” “Nothing,” he said, banging his wooden spoon on the steel vat. “You two like chicken soup?” “Oh, yes, that sounds perfect.” Beth hopped up onto a stool. “And some bread maybe—” Fritz materialized at her elbow with a baguette and a plate with butter. “For you, madam.” She had to laugh. “How did you know?” As Wrath sat on the stool next to her, George parked it between them. “I had him on standby.” A steaming bowl of soup was slid in front of her by the Shadow. “Enjoy.” “Him, too?” she asked of iAm. “Yeah, the Shadow mighta been on it as well.” Picking up the spoon Fritz offered her, she dug in, aware the three males were staring at her—Wrath with such intensity, it was almost as if he’d gotten his sight back— “Mmmmm,” she said—and meant it. The soup was perfect, simple, not too heavy, and warm, warm, warm. Maybe it was just that she’d been through the needing and not eaten for how long? “So what’s going on in the billiards room,” she asked, to try to distract the males. “They’re cleaning up after me.” She winced. “Ah.” Wrath patted around for the baguette and broke off the hard end, putting it aside. The piece he then tore for her was soft in the middle, crunchy on the outside—and the butter he put on it was the unsalted, sweet kind. The combo was great with the soup. “Would you like something to drink?” Fritz asked. “Wine?” iAm said—before catching himself. “No, not wine. Milk. You need the calcium.” “Good idea, Shadow,” Wrath chimed in as he nodded at Fritz. “Make it whole—” “No, no, that will make me gag.” Annnnd didn’t that stop all of them in their tracks. “Which was true before all the, well, you know. But the skim does sound good.” And so it went, the three of them waiting on her: More soup? iAm hit her bowl again right away. More bread with butter? Husband was on it. More milk? The butler raced for the fridge.

…[O]ne of the earliest genuine references to billiards in America reveals that the Colonial statesman William Byrd of Westover—who was educated in England and called to the bar at the Middle Temple—had a billiard table: in his diary entry for 30 July 1710, Byrd writes, apropos of having laid his wife, "It is to be observed that the flourish was performed on the billiard table.

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The tapestry looks valuable, so the driver turns it in to the district police, who assume it’s a cheap rug junked by a litterbug. It is colorful, though, and the officers place it on the floor of their break room, tucked beneath the billiards table, and walk on it for weeks, until they learn of the canal find and contact French authorities and Von der Mühll. The seventeenth-century tapestry is shipped to the same museum where the canal pieces are stored.

Even in the equations that had been formulated to describe electromagnetism, there is no natural directionality to the interactions of particles; the equations look the same going both directions. If you looked at a video of atoms interacting, you could play it backward and you wouldn’t be able to tell which was correct. It is only in the macroworld of objects, people, planets, and so on, the world governed by entropy, that causation appears to unfold in a single direction. The second law of thermodynamics describes the increasing disorder in the universe at macroscales and is often seen as equivalent to the one-way arrow of time. More and more physicists over the past few decades, sensitive to the nondirectionality that seems to rule at the micro or quantum level, have begun to question the no-teleology rule. Recall that the tiny particles making up the matter and energy of the physical universe are really like worms or strings snaking through the block universe of Minkowski spacetime. Their interactions, which look to us a bit like tiny balls colliding on a billiard table, are from a four-dimensional perspective more like threads intertwining; the twists and turns where they wrap around each other are what we see as collisions, interactions, and “measurements” (in the physicists’ preferred idiom). Each interaction changes information associated with those threads—their trajectory through the block universe (position and momentum) as well as qualities like “spin” that influence that trajectory. According to some recent theories, a portion of the information particles carry with them actually might propagate backward rather than forward across their world lines. For instance, an experiment at the University of Rochester in 2009 found that photons in a laser beam could be amplified in their past when interacted with a certain way during a subsequent measurement—true backward causation, in other words.8 The Israeli-American physicist Yakir Aharonov and some of his students are now arguing that the famous uncertainty principle—the extent to which the outcome of an interaction is random and unpredictable—may actually be a measure of the portion of future influence on a particle’s behavior.9 In other words, the notorious randomness of quantum mechanics—those statistical laws that captured Jung’s imagination—may be where retrocausation was hiding all along. And it would mean Einstein was right: God doesn’t play dice.*23 If the new physics of retrocausation is correct, past and future cocreate the pattern of reality built up from the threads of the material world. The world is really woven like a tapestry on a four-dimensional loom. It makes little sense to think of a tapestry as caused by one side only;

Imagine a billiard table without players. Nobody hits any balls. No earthquake shakes the room. No magnet exists, hidden under the table. Yet suddenly Ball A at one end of the table turns clockwise and Ball B at the other end of the table turns counterclockwise.

The seventieth, 1999. In the games room, which is located on level one of Hawke's four-level house, the full-sized billiard table is pushed out of the way and ice statues of a nude woman and man are filled with white wine. The women dispenses wine from her breasts, the man from his penis. One notable guest delights partygoers when she declines a glass and instead presses her mouth to the male's member to receiver her wine.

She took after her mother, and not only physically. I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother's, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player's arm movement. Where and when did it begin, the movement that later turned into Tereza's life?

He's not in the billiard room" "And neither is a billiard table, for that matter.

THE DEPOT at Nochecita had smooth stuccoed apricot walls, trimmed in a somehow luminous shade of gray—around the railhead and its freight sheds and electrical and machine shops, the town had grown, houses and businesses painted vermilion, sage, and fawn, and towering at the end of the main street, a giant sporting establishment whose turquoise and crimson electric lamps were kept lit all night and daytime, too, for the place never closed. There was an icehouse and a billiard parlor, a wine room, a lunch and eating counter, gambling saloons and taquerías. In the part of town across the tracks from all that, Estrella Briggs, whom everybody called Stray, was living upstairs in what had been once the domestic palace of a mine owner from the days of the first great ore strikes around here, now a dimly illicit refuge for secret lives, dark and in places unrepainted wood rearing against a sky which since this morning had been threatening storm. Walkways in from the street were covered with corrugated snow-shed roofing. The restaurant and bar on the ground-floor corner had been there since the boom times, offering two-bit all-you-can-eat specials, sawdust on the floor, heavy-duty crockery, smells of steaks, chops, venison chili, coffee and beer and so on worked into the wood of the wall paneling, old trestle tables, bar and barstools. At all hours the place’d be racketing with gambling-hall workers on their breaks, big-hearted winners and bad losers, detectives, drummers, adventuresses, pigeons, and sharpers. A sunken chamber almost like a natatorium at some hot-springs resort, so cool and dim that you forgot after a while about the desert waiting out there to resume for you soon as you stepped back into it. . . .

Michael Berry wrote a paper called Regular and Irregular Motion. He determined the predictability of the path of a struck billiards ball. The path after the first impact is easy to determine with basic geometry. The second path is a bit harder, but still relatively easy. By the 9th impact Berry determined that the gravitational pull of a person standing next to the table had enough of an influence on the ball path that it was necessary to be included in the calculations.

Only the Lonely” notwithstanding, the bar was remarkably silent – silent as the sound of un-struck billiard balls on the empty pool table. The buzzing of neon signs was less intrusive than the man's tinnitus. He was the only one left.

An official Taliban gazette published a week before the September 11 attacks clarified the following list of items formally banned in the Islamic Emirate: “The pig itself; pork; pig fat; objects made of human hair; natural human hair; dish antennas; sets for cinematography and sound recording projectors; sets for microphotography, in case it is used in the cinema; all instruments which themselves produce music, such as the piano, the harmonium, the flute, the tabla, the tanbour, the sarangi; billiard tables and their accessories; chess boards; carom boards; playing cards; masks; any alcoholic beverage; all audio cassettes, video cassettes, computers and television which include sex and music; centipedes; lobsters (a kind of sea animal); nail polish; firecrackers; fireworks (for children); all kinds of cinematographic films, even though they may be sent abroad; all statues of animate beings in general; all sewing catalogues which have photos of animate beings; published tableaus (photos); Christmas cards; greeting cards bearing images of living things; neckties; bows (the thing which strengthens the necktie); necktie pins.

With as little effort as though she weighed no more than a pillow, he lifted her up and laid her on the billiards table. She was vaguely aware of the balls scattering. Leaning over her, he braced his arms on either side of her head, his gaze intent. “Don’t marry him,” he urged, his voice low and sensual until it more closely resembled a caress. “I have to.” “Because of the kiss in the garden?” Her heart slammed into her ribs. “What do you know of the garden?” “Only rumors. The rest of your life shouldn’t be determined by a kiss.” Yet here she was thinking that if she weren’t betrothed, the kiss he had just delivered would have been the guiding star for the remainder of her life. No one else’s would ever measure up. A broken betrothal . . . Litton would sue. Her father wouldn’t allow that sort of scandal to happen. “You’re being a bit hypocritical. You’re asking me to change the direction of my life because you managed to steal a kiss that left me breathless. You had your chance with me, Chetwyn. You chose another. Now so have I.” “I can explain.