Cigarette Image Quotes

When people photograph an object, they often put a pack of cigarettes next to it to give the viewer a sense of the object’s actual size, but the pack of cigarettes next to the images in my memory expanded and contracted, depending on my mood at the time. Like the objects and events in constant flux, or perhaps in opposition to them, what should have been a fixed yardstick inside the framework of my memory seemed instead to be in perpetual motion.

A joke I used to repeat in those days was: Why be happy when you can be interesting? I knew how to be interesting. There was power in being a spectacle, even a miserable spectacle. The punch and the line. Interesting: sentences like serrated blades, laughter like machine-gun rounds, a drink in one hand, a borrowed cigarette in the other. If you could draw enough glances, any room could orbit around you.

We parked under a strange sky with a faint image of a quarter-moon superimposed on it. There was a little woods beside us. This day had been dry out and hot, the buck pines and what-all simmering patientyl, but as we sat there smoking cigarettes it started to get very cold. "The summer's over," I said.

It pays to give most products an image of quality – a First Class ticket. This is particularly true of products whose brand-name is visible to your friends, like beer, cigarettes and automobiles: products you ‘wear.’ If

If your child had only your behavior to watch, what would he see? Which of your behaviors does he copy most? Smoking a cigarette? Gossiping? Reading a book? Exercising? Singing? Drinking? Telling racial jokes? Swearing? Is it an image that you want your kid to copy? If not, what can you do to improve it so your kid has a better example?

I was wondering if the scene in the drawing-room had been a triumph or a disaster or merely a chaotic piece of bad taste verging on bathos, but I reflected that the only important question was whether I had communicated my message to my parents. I continued to smoke my cigarette and occasionally I shuddered. I wondered dimly how anyone ever survived their families.

Pamela’s husband, Randolph, newly minted member of Parliament, missed the birth. He was in London, in bed with the wife of an Austrian tenor, whose monocled image appeared on cigarette trading cards.

We began crafting ways to apply defusion and self skills to coping with the fear and pain of acceptance. Learning to defuse from the voice of the Dictator helps us keep a healthy distance from the negative messages that pop uninvited into our minds, like “Who are you kidding, you can’t deal with this!” It also helps diminish the power of the unhelpful relations that have been embedded in our thought networks, which are often activated by the pain involved in acceptance. For example, the relation between smoking a cigarette and feeling better will be triggered by the discomfort of craving a smoke. Reconnecting with our authentic self helps us practice self-compassion as we open up to unpleasant aspects of our lives, not berating ourselves for making mistakes or for feeling fear about dealing with the pain. We see beyond the image of a broken, weak, or afflicted self to the powerful true self that can choose to feel pain.

As the Minotaur walks to his car Buddy charges the fence, snorting, slobbering and barking maniacally. The Minotaur is no longer afraid of Buddy, and he knows the dog means no real harm. But they have an unspoken understanding. Each of them has a history; each clings to an image, however diminished, of himself and his place in the world.

I realized that I had come here in the hope of once more finding that man so hopelessly in love: I had not seen him for years and years, although this memory lies like a transparency over all the visions I have of him. That evening, for the very reason that the surroundings were the same, the old image, coming into contact with a flesh and blood man smoking a cigarette, fell to dust and ashes, I had a shattering revelation: time goes by. I began to weep.

a campus security officer who’d been waiting quietly in the corner of a stairwell landing told us that the top of the building was off-limits. He had an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a cell phone in his hands and looked for all the world like we’d just caught him about to take an unauthorized text and smoke break. What didn’t quite jibe with that image was that most campus security guards don’t look like they pick their teeth with a chainsaw, and their sidearms aren’t made for moose hunting.

Last night, Good Friday night, at the bottom of the escalator at King’s X tube, a weasel-faced man in uniform was sweeping up rubbish with a wide broom, drink cartons, cigarette packets with all the dust and filthy scraps of the day which he pushed towards an elegant long black glove that was lying there. I expected him to pick it up as I would have – I thought of picking it up, but was too late. He smothered it in a wide sweep. It seemed to me extraordinary and shocking that he had no feeling for it. Several images went through my mind, a symbolic hand, a dead blackbird, an ornamental bookmark fallen from a lectern Bible – any once-precious relic being tumbled in the dirt. As I went up the escalator I remembered the Tatterdemallion whom I haven’t seen for months and thought of his body, if he were to die in the tube, being tumbled about with the rest of the thrown-away rubbish.” David Thomson, In Camden Town

An example: A few years ago, the public health authorities in Canada, where it had been estimated that smoking kills forty-five thousand people a year, decided to supplement the warning printed on every pack of cigarettes with a shock-photograph—of cancerous lungs, or a stroke-clotted brain, or a damaged heart, or a bloody mouth in acute periodontal distress. A pack with such a picture accompanying the warning about the deleterious effects of smoking would be sixty times more likely to inspire smokers to quit, a research study had somehow calculated, than a pack with only the verbal warning. Let’s assume this is true. But one might wonder, for how long? Does shock have term limits? Right now the smokers of Canada are recoiling in disgust, if they do look at these pictures. Will those still smoking five years from now still be upset? Shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn’t, one can not look. People have means to defend themselves against what is upsetting—in this instance, unpleasant information for those wishing to continue to smoke. This seems normal, that is, adaptive. As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images.

I worked and worked, and before I knew it, my collage was finished. Still damp from Elmer’s glue, the masterpiece included images of horses--courtesy, coincidentally, of Marlboro cigarette ads--and footballs. There were pictures of Ford pickups and green grass--anything I could find in my old magazines that even remotely hinted at country life. There was a rattlesnake: Marlboro Man hated snakes. And a photo of a dark, starry night: Marlboro Man was afraid of the dark as a child. There were Dr Pepper cans, a chocolate cake, and John Wayne, whose likeness did me a great favor by appearing in some ad in Golf Digest in the early 1980s. My collage would have to do, even though it was missing any images depicting the less tangible things--the real things--I knew about Marlboro Man. That he missed his brother Todd every day of his life. That he was shy in social settings. That he knew off-the-beaten-path Bible stories--not the typical Samson-and-Delilah and David-and-Goliath tales, but obscure, lesser-known stories that I, in a lifetime of skimming, would never have hoped to read. That he hid in an empty trash barrel during a game of hide-and-seek at the Fairgrounds when he was seven…and that he’d gotten stuck and had to be extricated by firefighters. That he hated long pasta noodles because they were too difficult to eat. That he was sweet. Caring. Serious. Strong. The collage was incomplete--sorely lacking vital information.

One of the greatest difficulties we human beings seem to have is to relinquish long-held ideas. Many of us are addicted to being right, even if facts do not support us. One fixed image we cling to, as iconic in today’s culture as the devil was in previous ages, is that of the addict as an unsavoury and shadowy character, given to criminal activity. What we don’t see is how we’ve contributed to making him a criminal. There is nothing more intrinsically criminal in the average drug user than in the average cigarette smoker or alcohol addict. The drugs they inject or inhale do not themselves induce criminal activity by their pharmacological effect, except perhaps in the way that alcohol can also fuel a person’s pent-up aggression and remove the mental inhibitions that thwart violence. Stimulant drugs may have that effect on some users, but narcotics like heroin do not; on the contrary, they tend to calm people down. It is withdrawal from opiates that makes people physically ill, irritable and more likely to act violently — mostly out of desperation to replenish their supply. The criminality associated with addiction follows directly from the need to raise money to purchase drugs at prices that are artificially inflated owing to their illegality. The addict shoplifts, steals and robs because it’s the only way she can obtain the funds to pay the dealer. History has demonstrated many times over that people will transgress laws and resist coercion when it comes to struggling for their basic needs — or what they perceive as such. Sam Sullivan, Vancouver’s quadriplegic mayor, told a conference on drug addiction once that if wheelchairs were illegal, he would do anything to get one, no matter what laws he had to break. It was an apt comparison: the hardcore addict feels equally handicapped without his substances. As we have seen, many addicts who deal in drugs do so exclusively to finance their habit. There is no profit in it for them.

Imagine that someone came up with a brilliant new campaign against smoking. It would show graphic images of people dying of lung cancer followed by the punch line: ‘It’s easy to be healthy—smoke one less cigarette a month.’ We know without a moment’s reflection that this campaign would fail,” wrote British climate activist and author George Marshall. “The target is so ludicrous, and the disconnection between the images and the message is so great, that most smokers would just laugh it off.

So how can we rejig our brains and get back to that blissful state of never wanting or needing a cigarette? That may sound difficult to you at this stage, even impossible, but I promise you it’s not only possible but also extremely easy! All you need to do is use your intellect to replace the misinformed reactions with correctly informed ones. Here’s an exercise to show you how easy that is. Look at the image below, let your imagination run wild and see if you can make anything of it.

would prance around the place smoking cigarettes through an outrageously long holder, wearing a russet curly wig and a long copper-colored gown that hung from her bony frame, conjuring to Alex’s mind the image of a man-sized cockroach standing on its hind legs.

Three windows. And in the third, high in the top storey of the solid, snow-hushed house on this hill at the edge of Christmas the most extraordinary face of all: a visage of curious alloy: earthly wisdom and heavenly innocence, grief like a stone and humor like flame; a face of age and yet of ageless youth. Marya Alexander, mother of Nell Dance, sits in her flowered rocker by the glass and sees through it the soft, white onslaught of the snow and read within each intricately. Jeweled flake the timelessness of Time itself and of loss and of love and of love’s ending. Upon her old spectacles perches a small gold parakeet and she puffs now pensively upon a cigarette and blows the ghost of smoke against the enchanted window pane and witnesses there, for an instant, the misted image of faces long lost beneath so many snows, and smiles to herself at the knowing that Christmastide and a good heart’s breath against a cold pane are enough to bring lost faces back in evergreen eternity.

But the truth is, the image of Azeer with a cigarette between his soft lips, combined with his woodsy cologne and the faint smell of smoke has me feeling all sorts of things.

Many years ago I saw a short film sequence of a little girl. She was wearing a pretty dress as she skipped down a narrow cobbled lane. The people around smiled fondly as she passed. The grainy, black-and-white image did nothing to detract from the happy scene, and the light, summery music gave a feeling of well-being. The audience’s attention was focused entirely on the child. Then the identical film was shown again, but this time with sinister music playing. There was a gasp from the audience. For the first time, every person in the room noticed an unsmiling man standing at the mouth of a dark alley, smoking a cigarette and watching the girl. In spite of already knowing the ending, there was a sigh of relief when the child was reunited with her mother. Same film. Different music. For some people, life is like that. They filter out the positive and focus on the negative. They make assumptions about what somebody else is thinking, and believe only in the worst possible outcome. They are listening to a sinister tune. Is this you? If so, change the music, and focus on the positive. Listen to a happy tune, and see if the man skulking in the doorway disappears from view. “Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” William James

If you cut a point from a starfish it will grow a new point. Not only that, the point will grow a whole new starfish, because the genetic imprint is contained in each and every one of its parts. I was at a holographic exhibition several years ago in which I saw an exhibit of photographs done with holography. In one of the pictures was an image of a woman standing upright. If I moved to the right of the picture the woman changed suddenly and she was now smoking a cigarette; if I moved to the left of the picture it changed again and she had her hip thrown out in a suggestive pose. If one were to drop this holographic plate onto the floor and it shattered into pieces, each piece would reveal not what you would expect to see—a piece of her shoe or dress or maybe her eye—but the image of the whole woman. And if one moved any one of the little pieces from side to side, you would still see her smoke that cigarette and throw out her hip. Every single one of the small pieces would have the whole picture contained within it.

The smoke burns slightly down my throat and to my lungs. I focus on this, and empty my head, empty the images of Skye’s beautiful face all bruised up. In the end, I can’t even give her what she’s rightfully asking. A kiss. Just a fucking kiss on her lips. Even that I’m unable to do. It’d be pathetic if our situation and our past weren’t so tragic. I take another drag of my cigarette and watch the smoke swirling in the room only lit by the moonlight. — Duke

Existentialism is commonly associated with Left-Bank Parisian cafes and the ‘family’ of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir who gathered there in the years immediately following the liberation of Paris at the end of World War II. One imagines offbeat, avant-garde intellectuals, attached to their cigarettes, listening to jazz as they hotly debate the implications of their new-found political and artistic liberty. The mood is one of enthusiasm, creativity, anguished self-analysis, and freedom – always freedom. Though this reflects the image projected by the media of the day and doubtless captures the spirit of the time, it glosses over the philosophical significance of existentialist thought, packaging it as a cultural phenomenon of a certain historical period. That is perhaps the price paid by a manner of thinking so bent on doing philosophy concretely rather than in some abstract and timeless manner. The existentialists’ urge for contemporary relevance fired their social and political commitment. But it also linked them with the problems of their day and invited subsequent generations to view them as having the currency of yesterday’s news. Such is the misreading of existentialist thought that I hope to correct in this short volume. If it bears the marks of its post-war appearance, existentialism as a manner of doing philosophy and a way of addressing the issues that matter in people’s lives is at least as old as philosophy itself. It is as current as the human condition which it examines.

Their hair in curlers and their heads wrapped in loud scarves, young mothers, fattish in trousers, lounge about in the speedwash, smoking cigarettes, eating candy, drinking pop, thumbing magazines, and screaming at their children above the whir and rumble of the machines. At the bank a young man freshly pressed is letting himself in with a key. Along the street, delicately teetering, many grandfathers move in a dream. During the murderous heat of the summer, they perch on window ledges, their feet dangling just inside the narrow shelf of shade the store has made, staring steadily into the street. Where their consciousness has gone I can’t say. It’s not in the eyes. Perhaps it’s diffuse, all temperature and skin, like an infant’s, though more mild. Near the corner there are several large overalled men employed in standing. A truck turns to be weighed on the scales at the Feed and Grain. Images drift on the drugstore window. The wind has blown the smell of cattle into town. Our eyes have been driven in like the eyes of the old men. And there’s no one to have mercy on us.

The empty dishes on the kitchen table. A glass over the corner of a napkin. The liquid at its bottom, vibrating at the rhythm of my drumming. There it was, in all its splendour: Reality. All the mysteries and any possible revelation were in that domestic glass, sleeping under a veil. Every possible adventure, already taking place at the point where a gaze encounters an object, or a mind a thought. I looked at the shadow-lines that the table lamp cast on the napkin and followed their trajectory beyond their mark. I looked at the reflections on the glass and slid the back of my hand against its cold body. I wondered if it might feel me, the same as I felt it. If it was staring at me and receiving as silent an answer as the one I got from it. Maybe I was doing it wrong. I should have proceeded with order: cataloguing what I could see and all its qualities, while looking for a gap where my reason could break in. Or maybe I should have done the opposite: becoming pure awareness, staring at my surroundings devoid of any intentions, with the clear eye of a hanging mirror. The cigarette embers licked my fingers and I put it out in the ashtray. I had done that countless times already: looking and looking and finding nothing else than what I knew. I was surrounded by a library, encased within each speck of space and time, and yet I was blind to its words. I felt tired. The glass was still there. I closed my eyes to look for the image of it that I had impressed in my memory. I found it. I lost it. I found it again, and soon it faded. I stretched my legs under the table and I rested my head on the palm of my hands. The glass was still there in my memory. I found it. I lost it. I looked again.

The inspiration for a particular novel can be a phrase, a sentence, an image, a situation. But novelists aren’t poets. They are grinders. What sends me up to my study is a feeling in the back of the throat—like the desire for my first cigarette. Writing is a far more physical process than is generally believed. Half the time you seem to be mutely and helplessly obeying your body.

Close your eyes and imagine a vast, open space, perhaps a meadow or a clearing in a forest. In the center of this space stands a young tree, still delicate and small. This tree represents you at the beginning of your smoking journey. Its brown and withered leaves symbolize the harmful effects of smoking on your health and life. With each cigarette you’ve smoked, the tree has suffered another blow. Its leaves have turned browner, its bark has become more cracked, and its branches more brittle. But then, you make the decision to quit smoking. As soon as you make this decision, the tree begins to change. With each smoke-free day, new green leaves sprout. Its bark becomes smoother, its branches sturdier. It grows and extends its roots deep into the earth, absorbing nutrients and reaching for the sky. With each passing day, the tree becomes larger, stronger, and more vibrant. Months and years go by, and the tree becomes a monumental testament to your determination and willpower. Its dense foliage offers shelter and shade, and its sturdy trunk withstands the fiercest storms. It is a symbol of health, growth, and longevity. This tree represents your life without cigarettes. It shows that from a decision, from a first step, powerful change can arise. Every time you feel the urge to smoke, remember your Tree of Life and see how it continues to evolve, bloom, and thrive. Use this image as inspiration and a reminder that you have the power to change yourself and your life for the better.

Stewart was a superb radio actor, overcoming the drift of some scripts into folksy platitude. His narration-in-whisper of one particular climax (The Silver Belt-Buckle) was a gripping moment of truth, and the series as a whole just lacked the fine edge to be found in radio’s two best westerns, Gunsmoke and Frontier Gentleman. In the theme, Basil Adlam provided a haunting melody, conjuring up the wandering plainsman. Despite Stewart’s great prestige, the show was largely sustained. Chesterfield was interested, but Stewart declined, not wanting a cigarette company to counter his largely wholesome screen image.

But reformers' attempts to devise less restrictive forms of female clothing, like the Bloommer costume, which proposed trousers for women, conjured up in many people's minds lurid images of unrestrained female sexuality and social liberty, including a veritable world turned upside down, were trousered women smoked cigarettes and hen-pecked men washed the laundry and took care of the children.

I slip up in interviews all the time but I've never maintained a clean-cut image so people don't really care. I've never hidden the fact that I smoke, so if I'm pictured smoking a cigarette now, nobody says much about it.

For two decades, our escape defined me. It dominated my personality and compelled my every decision. By college, half my life had led up to our escape and the other half was spent reliving it, in churches and retreats where my mother made it a hagiograpihc journey, on college applications where it was a plea, at sleepovers where it was entertainment, and in discussion groups after public viewings of xenophobic melodrama like China Cry and Not Without my Daughter, films about Christian women facing death and escaping to America. Our story was a sacred thread woven into my identity. Sometimes people asked, But don't a lot of Christians live there? or Couldn't your mother just say she was Muslim? It would take me a long time to get over those kinds of questions. They felt like a bad grade, like a criticism of my face and body...Once in an Oklahoma church, a woman said, "Well, I sure do get it. You came for a better life." I thought I'd pass out -- a better life? In Isfahan, we had yellow spray roses, a pool. A glass enclosure shot up through our living room, and inside that was a tree. I had a tree inside my house; I had the papery hand of Morvarid, my friend nanny, a ninety-year-old village woman; I had my grandmother's fruit leather and Hotel Koorosh schnitzels and sour cherries and orchards and a farm - life in Iran was a fairytale. In Oklahoma, we lived in an apartment complex for the destitute and disenfranchised. Life was a big gray parking lot with cigarette butts baking in oil puddles, slick children idling in the beating sun, teachers who couldn't do math. I dedicated my youth and every ounce of my magic to get out of there. A better life? The words lodged in my ear like grit. Gradually, all those retellings felt like pandering. The skeptics drew their conclusions based on details that I had provided them: my childhood dreams of Kit Kats and flawless bananas. My academic ambitions. I thought of how my first retelling was in an asylum office in Italy: how merciless that with the sweat and dust of escape still on our brows, we had to turn our ordeal into a good, persuasive story or risk being sent back. Then, after asylum was secured, we had to relive that story again and again, to earn our place, to calm casual skeptics. Every day of her new life, the refugee is asked to differentiate herself from the opportunist, the economic migrant... Why do the native-born perpetuate this distinction? Why harm the vulnerable with the threat of this stigma? ...To draw a line around a birthright, a privilege. Unlike economic migrants, refugees have no agency; they are no threat. Often, they are so broken, they beg to be remade into the image of the native. As recipients of magnanimity, they can be pitied. But if you are born in the Third World, and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, your dreams are suspicious. You are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief. You are reaching above your station.

What exactly is he trying to sell?’ Ignoring Catherine Austin, Dr Nathan walked over to the photographs of the isolation volunteers on the enamel wall beside the window. The question revealed either astonishing ignorance or a complicity in that conspiracy of the unconscious he had only now begun to unravel. He turned to face the young woman, irritated as always by her strong, quizzical gaze, an overlay of her own potent sexuality. ‘ You, Dr Austin. These advertisements constitute an explicit portrait of yourself, a contour map of your own body, an obscene newsreel of yourself during intercourse.’ He rapped the magazines with his gold cigarette case. ‘These images are fragments in a terminal moraine left behind by your passage through consciousness.

The Primary Act. As they entered the cinema, Dr Nathan confided to Captain Webster, ‘Talbert has accepted in absolute terms the logic of the sexual union. For him all junctions, whether of our own soft biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another. What Talbert is searching for is the primary act of intercourse, the first apposition of the dimensions of time and space. In the multiplied body of the film actress - one of the few valid landscapes of our age - he finds what seems to be a neutral ground. For the most part the phenomenology of the world is a nightmarish excrescence. Our bodies, for example, are for him monstrous extensions of puffy tissue he can barely tolerate. The inventory of the young woman is in reality a death kit.’ Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do - sodomize the Festival Hall? Pressure Points. Koester ran towards the road as the helicopter roared overhead, its fans churning up a storm of pine needles and cigarette cartons. He shouted at Catherine Austin, who was squatting on the nylon blanket, steering her body stocking around her waist. Two hundred yards beyond the pines was the perimeter fence. She followed Koester along the verge, the pressure of his hands and loins still marking her body. These zones formed an inventory as sterile as the items in Talbert’s kit. With a smile she watched Koester trip clumsily over a discarded tyre. This unattractive and obsessed young man - why had she made love to him? Perhaps, like Koester, she was merely a vector in Talbert’s dreams. Central Casting. Dr Nathan edged unsteadily along the catwalk, waiting until Webster had reached the next section. He looked down at the huge geometric structure that occupied the central lot of the studio, now serving as the labyrinth in an elegant film version of The Minotaur . In a sequel to Faustus and The Shrew , the film actress and her husband would play Ariadne and Theseus. In a remarkable way the structure resembled her body, an exact formalization of each curve and cleavage. Indeed, the technicians had already christened it ‘Elizabeth’. He steadied himself on the wooden rail as the helicopter appeared above the pines and sped towards them. So the Daedalus in this neural drama had at last arrived. An Unpleasant Orifice. Shielding his eyes, Webster pushed through the camera crew. He stared up at the young woman standing on the roof of the maze, helplessly trying to hide her naked body behind her slim hands. Eyeing her pleasantly, Webster debated whether to climb on to the structure, but the chances of breaking a leg and falling into some unpleasant orifice seemed too great. He stood back as a bearded young man with a tight mouth and eyes ran forwards. Meanwhile Talbert strolled in the centre of the maze, oblivious of the crowd below, calmly waiting to see if the young woman could break the code of this immense body. All too clearly there had been a serious piece of miscasting. ‘Alternate’ Death. The helicopter was burning briskly. As the fuel tank exploded, Dr Nathan stumbled across the cables. The aircraft had fallen on to the edge of the maze, crushing one of the cameras. A cascade of foam poured over the heads of the retreating technicians, boiling on the hot concrete around the helicopter. The body of the young woman lay beside the controls like a figure in a tableau sculpture, the foam forming a white fleece around her naked shoulders.

The glow, back over the common, comes from the railway: that’s the Church candle, been burning now quite a number of years: there, that’s the light the lover flicks as he follows the joys of consummation with the joys of a cigarette: that light was the flash as a man shot himself:     that’s a searchlight feeling for bombers: there, the light appears as the squinting wife regards the fuddled husband: these are twin headlights of a capitalist’s car: this, the gaslight of a trodden worker who would tread: that’s the light of a cinema:      that’s the light of Mars that’s the moon that’s a match.      Alone now, in my dark room     The pebbles cease to drop into the rocking pool         And gradually the surface quietens     Reflecting image of darkest peace and silence.     No questions catch the clothes     But only as it were a spreading     Draws all threads to their finished pattern         And you are pieced together bit by bit     Set against the evening     Lovely and glowing, like a chain of gold. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)

As long as a match stays alight. As much as you have time to see in the room that flares and fizzles out. The images holding, briefly, then fall. Some lines you manage, they are gone, another match, again. Pieces missing, empty pages, match, again. Comes across an unknown word and sticks in your mind. And where are the dwelling places of the wicked. Ask those who pass by beside you. Match, some smudged parts again like those of the Testament, then some of his pieces, then mine. The light so brief that you don’t have time to write, in the dark you can’t see if the page is blank. You write, a match, words falling on top of each other, another page, write, again a match, page blank, continue, another half-written page, read, the matches almost gone. You turn the pages by feel, finger them. Where you find written patches, you add your own beneath, you write in between. A match, read, your own together with the stranger’s, more again. As if you were speaking with someone. Match, pull on the cigarette try to read under the glow. No. Match, anguish that the objects go away again. As when I went away. [...] Last match. Full Moon

Bătrânul și cărțile Bătrânul scriitor era bolnav. La librar, cineva răsfoia ultima lui carte și mi se părea că asist la o licitare de obiecte. Mă așteptam să văd pe coperți nasturii ori monogramele curioase ale cămășilor lui, ochelarii și țigaretul ieftin. Ieri a murit. Cărțile din biblioteca lui, in-folii lucioase, bine hrănite, pergamentele cojite și albumele decolorate vor fi trimise la anticariat, prin frig. Bătrânul nu suporta să le fie frig, ori să fie singure. În ele a rămas poate, cerneala sângelui lui. Acum cărțile se vor risipi, pielea lor se strânge de teamă, oglinzile se descarcă de el, iar hainele se topesc în scrin, și în pachetul de tutun cântă greieri. Cărțile ele, vor pali puțin, și mi le grămădesc cu policioarele roșii, în amintire… Mă sfătuia, cu seninătate, să nu fac dragoste „în prezenta cărților”, și pentru prima oară nu zâmbesc. Ferestrele se sting, motanul, mai vechi ca fotoliile, își ia lumea-n cap, și cobor pe treptele roase din casa bătrânului, în vreme ce fără de veste, spre odaia moartă lunecă pe lângă mine, în lift, aproape strivindu-mă, gleznele fetei lui, în ciorapi negri... * Le vieillard et les livres Le vieil écrivain était malade. On feuilletait chez le libraire son dernier bouquin et il me semblait assister à une vente aux enchères. Sur la couverture, je m'attendais à voir ses boutons, de chemise ou leur chiffre bizarre, ses lunettes et son fume-cigarettes bon marché. C'est hier qu'il est mort. Les livres de sa bibliothèque, des in-folios satinés, bien nourris, des parchemins pelés et des albums pâlis seront expédiés aux bouquinistes, en plein hiver. Le vieux ne supportait pas qu'ils aient froid, ni qu'ils soient seuls. Ils ont gardé peut-être l'encre de son sang. Maintenant tous ces bouquins vont être éparpillés, leur peau se crispe de terreur, les miroirs se déchargent de son image, ses vêtements se liquéfient dans la commode et dans son paquet de tabac chantent les cigales. Désormais ces bouquins vont pâlir un peu et je les empile, rayons compris, dans ma mémoire… Sans broncher, il me conseillait de ne pas faire l'amour « en présence des livres » et c'est la première fois que je ne souris pas. Les fenêtres s'éteignent, le matou, plus décrépit que les fauteuils, s'esquive, et je descends les marches usées de la maison du vieux lorsque soudain, à l'improviste, vers la chambre défunte sortent de l'ascenseur, en me frôlant, m’écrasant presque, les jambes de sa fille, gainées de noir... (p. 201-203, traduit du roumain par Irina Radu)

During the Weimar period Hitler’s inner circle had already managed to establish an image of him as a man working tirelessly, putting his life completely at the service of “his” people. A picture was created of an unassailable leader-figure, entirely devoted to the Herculean task of gaining control of Germany’s social contradictions and problems, and to ironing out the negative consequences of the lost world war. One of Hitler’s allies reported in 1930: “He is all genius and body. And he mortifies that body in a way that would shock people like us! He doesn’t drink, he practically only eats vegetables, and he doesn’t touch women.”18 Hitler allegedly didn’t even allow himself coffee and legend had it that after the First World War he threw his last pack of cigarettes into the Danube near Linz; from then onward, supposedly, no poisons would enter his body.