Playing Billiards Quotes

..."And then we played Ping-Pong—” “Not pool? I always assumed he was a billiards man—I mean, it’s so handy the way he keeps a stick up his—

Nature, it seems, is the popular name for milliards and milliards and milliards of particles playing their infinite game of billiards and billiards and billiards.

A certain skill at billiards is the mark of a gentleman, but to play too well is the sign of a misspent youth. Lucien Fairchild

Along the way [Mozart] got married; fathered seven children (two of whom survived into adulthood); performed as a pianist; violinist; and conductor; maintained a successful teaching studio; wrote thousands of letters; traveled widely; attended the theater religiously; played cards, billiards, and bocce; and rode horseback for exercise. Not bad for someone portrayed as a giggling idiot in the movies.

All they needed was a title. Carmack had the idea. It was taken from The Color of Money, the 1986 Martin Scorsese film in which Tom Cruise played a brash young pool hustler. In one scene Cruise saunters into a billiards hall carrying his favorite pool cue in a stealth black case. “What you got in there?” another player asks. Cruise smiles devilishly, because he knows what fate he is about to spring upon this player, just as, Carmack thought, id had once sprung upon Softdisk and as, with this next game, they might spring upon the world. “In here?” Cruise replies, flipping open the case. “Doom.

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.

Speaking about time’s relentless passage, Powell’s narrator compares certain stages of experience to the game of Russian Billiards as once he used to play it with a long vanished girlfriend. A game in which, he says, “...at the termination of a given passage of time...the hidden gate goes down...and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity."

For howsoever bad the devil can be in fustian or smock-frock (and he can be very bad in both), he is a more designing, callous, and intolerable devil when he sticks a pin in his shirt-front, calls himself a gentleman, backs a card or colour, plays a game or so of billiards, and knows a little about bills and promissory notes, than in any other form he wears.

Don't go into public houses and play billiards. Always aim at something higher. When placed in a responsible position, don't trust your fellow-creatures.

So be my friend,” he said, his tone lifting. “Dine with me, play billiards with me. Tell me what books you’re reading—or buying,” he added with a wink in the direction of her parcels.

The outfield's billiard green: no bare patches, no flowers. The things that are painted white-the sightscreen, the pickets around the boundary-are so white it hurts. The hoses and the boundary line are white. The entire playing surface is perfectly flat and level. And in the middle of the ground, across that wide carpet of perfect grass, the holy of holies. A turf wicket.

There are certain phases of mind in which a man can neither ride nor shoot, nor play a stroke at billiards, nor remember a card at whist, — and to such a phase of mind had come both Crosbie and Dale after their conversation over the gate.

after a quarter of an hour the bug-eyed Marie-Louise had sensed her mater’s approval and settled I would be her Prince Charming. She asked this: “Mr. Frobisher, are you well acquainted with Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street?” Well, thought I, the day might not be a complete wreck. A girl with a taste for irony must conceal some depths. But Marie-Louise was serious! A congenital dunce. No, I replied, I didn’t know Mr. Holmes personally, but he and David Copperfield could be seen playing billiards at my club every Wednesday.

With children he was playful in that particularly spiteful Sicilian style which is one of the less pleasant sides of the island character; he would nip their ears with his scissors and sometimes cut their hair so short that their heads looked like billiard balls.

Baudelaire" When I fall asleep, and even during sleep, I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial, Having no relation to my affairs. Dear Mother, is any time left to us In which to be happy? My debts are immense. My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment. I know nothing. I cannot know anything. I have lost the ability to make an effort. But now as before my love for you increases. You are always armed to stone me, always: It is true. It dates from childhood. For the first time in my long life I am almost happy. The book, almost finished, Almost seems good. It will endure, a monument To my obsessions, my hatred, my disgust. Debts and inquietude persist and weaken me. Satan glides before me, saying sweetly: “Rest for a day! You can rest and play today. Tonight you will work.” When night comes, My mind, terrified by the arrears, Bored by sadness, paralyzed by impotence, Promises: “Tomorrow: I will tomorrow.” Tomorrow the same comedy enacts itself With the same resolution, the same weakness. I am sick of this life of furnished rooms. I am sick of having colds and headaches: You know my strange life. Every day brings Its quota of wrath. You little know A poet’s life, dear Mother: I must write poems, The most fatiguing of occupations. I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me. I write from a café near the post office, Amid the click of billiard balls, the clatter of dishes, The pounding of my heart. I have been asked to write “A History of Caricature.” I have been asked to write “A History of Sculpture.” Shall I write a history Of the caricatures of the sculptures of you in my heart? Although it costs you countless agony, Although you cannot believe it necessary, And doubt that the sum is accurate, Please send me money enough for at least three weeks.

His head bent to hers as they walked. "Is everything all right, sweet?" "Yes. I..." She paused, smiled, and said lamely, "I just wanted to see you." Stopping with her behind a column, Sebastian ducked his head to steal a kiss. He looked down at her, his eyes sparkling. "Shall we go play a game of billiards?" he whispered, and laughed huskily as she blushed.

The afternoon was wet: a walk the party had proposed to take to see a gipsy camp, lately pitched on a common beyond Hay, was consequently deferred. Some of the gentlemen were gone to the stables: the younger ones, together with the younger ladies, were playing billiards in the billiard-room. The dowagers Ingram and Lynn sought solace in a quiet game at cards. Blanche Ingram, after having repelled, by supercilious taciturnity, some efforts of Mrs. Dent and Mrs. Eshton to draw her into conversation, had first murmured over some sentimental tunes and airs on the piano, and then, having fetched a novel from the library, had flung herself in haughty listlessness on a sofa, and prepared to beguile, by the spell of fiction, the tedious hours of absence. The room and the house were silent: only now and then the merriment of the billiard-players was heard from above.

Answer me, Penelope. Why are you here?" She met his gaze, her blue eyes firm. "I told you. I'm here to play billiards." "With Cross." "Well, to be fair, I thought it might be with you." "Why would you think that?" He would never have invited her to his gaming hell. "The invitation was delivered by Mrs. Worth. I thought you sent it." "Why would I send you an invitation?" "I don't know. Perhaps you'd realized you were wrong and did not want to admit it aloud?

The current implicit ideology that dominates the world, especially in the West, still continues to profess, officially, the utopia inherited from the egalitarian philosophy of the Enlightenment (Eighteenth century), positivism and scientism (Nineteenth century): to create a situation where, in a few decades, some eight billion people will live on the planet with a good standard of living and democracy for all. All this resembles the billiard player who imagines that after four or five rebounds his ball will automatically fall into the hole. These professors of ballistics are playing golf, but they do not know it.

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.

Only last Sunday, when poor wretches were gay—within the walls playing with children among the clipped trees and the statues in the Palace Garden; walking, a score abreast, in the Elysian Fields, made more Elysian by performing dogs and wooden horses; between whiles filtering (a few) through the gloomy Cathedral of Our Lady to say a word or two at the base of a pillar within flare of a rusty little gridiron-full of gusty little tapers; without the walls encompassing Paris with dancing, love-making, wine-drinking, tobacco-smoking, tomb-visiting, billiard card and domino playing, quack-doctoring, and much murderous refuse, animate and inanimate—only last Sunday, my Lady, in the desolation of Boredom and the clutch of Giant Despair, almost hated her own maid for being in spirits. She cannot, therefore, go too fast from Paris. Weariness of soul lies before her, as it lies behind—her Ariel has put a girdle of it round the whole earth, and it cannot be unclasped—but the imperfect remedy is always to fly from the last place where it has been experienced. Fling Paris back into the distance, then, exchanging it for endless avenues and cross-avenues of wintry trees! And, when next beheld, let it be some leagues away, with the Gate of the Star a white speck glittering in the sun, and the city a mere mound in a plain—two dark square towers rising out of it, and light and shadow descending on it aslant, like the angels in Jacob's dream!

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.

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.

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.

Indeed, one view of the European debt crisis—the Greek street view—is that it is an elaborate attempt by the German government on behalf of its banks to get their money back without calling attention to what they are up to. The German government gives money to the European Union rescue fund so that it can give money to the Irish government so that the Irish government can give money to Irish banks, so the Irish banks can repay their loans to the German banks. “They are playing billiards,” says Enderlein. “The easier way to do it would be to give German money to the German banks and let the Irish banks fail.

In the plain ordinary hustle you hide your true speed; in the psychological hustle you try to drive your opponent out of his fucking skull... There is a small-time pool player in San Francisco called Snakeface who pretends that if he gets beat he might go crazy or get a heart attack. He's no youngster, but when he misses a shot or gets a bad break he jumps back, swings his cue in a circle, cusses with all his strength, and turns beet red. Years ago he used to put his head down and run himself into the wall, but he gave that up. This act puts quite a bit of pressure on the guy he is playing, who may not want to kill an old man for two dollars.

My Army superiors, like Pa, were nonplussed. They didn’t care about me playing billiards in the privacy of a hotel room, naked or not.

A superficial understanding of science can lead to the assumption that the universe plays out like clockwork. As if the initial conditions were set up in the beginning, then someone hit the go button and everything since has followed in a predetermined manner. This again, is a mechanistic view. Those who make this assumption, without realizing it, are modelling the universe as a machine, as if there were nothing more to it than the straight forward Newtonian mechanisms of clockwork. They assume reality to be nothing but a cascade of atoms bumping into one another like a line of dominoes falling eternally in what could be called ‘the billiard ball model’ of reality.

once confided to him late at night after a game of billiards and rather a lot of excellent port that his wife hated it so much that she’d only let him do it when she wanted a baby. She was a damned attractive woman, too, and a wonderful wife, as Martyn had said. In other ways. They had five children, and Martyn didn’t think she was going to wear a sixth. Rotten for him. When Edward had suggested that he find consolation elsewhere, Martyn had simply gazed at him with mournful brown eyes and said, ‘But I’m in love with her, old boy, always have been. Never looked at anyone else. You know how it is.’ And Edward, who didn’t, said of course he did. That conversation had warned him off Marcia Slocombe-Jones anyhow. It didn’t matter, because although he could have gone for her there were so many other girls to go for. How lucky he was! To have come back from France not only alive, but relatively unscathed! In winter, his chest played him up a bit due to living in trenches where the gas had hung about for weeks, but otherwise . . . Since then he’d come back, gone straight into the family firm, met Villy at a party, married her as soon as her contract with the ballet company she was with expired and as soon as she’d agreed to the Old Man’s dictate that her career should stop from then on. ‘Can’t marry a gal whose head’s full of something else. If marriage isn’t the woman’s career, it won’t be a good marriage.’ His attitude was thoroughly Victorian, of course, but all the same, there was quite a lot to be said for it. Whenever Edward looked at his own mother, which he did infrequently but with great affection, he saw her as the perfect reflection of his father’s attitude: a woman who had serenely fulfilled all her family responsibilities and at the same time retained her youthful enthusiasms – for her garden that she adored and for music. At over seventy, she was quite capable of playing double concertos with professionals. Unable to discriminate between the darker, more intricate veins of temperament that distinguish one person from another, he could not really see why Villy should not be as happy and fulfilled as the Duchy. (His mother’s Victorian reputation for plain living – nothing rich in food and no frills or pretensions about her own appearance or her household’s had long ago earned her the nickname of Duchess – shortened by her own children to

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.

Very well, I can work with all this. Go away, Darcy, and take a nap, or play billiards with Richard, or something of the sort.

Page three hundred and four of The Lady's Guide," Beatrice replied. "Ladies are permitted to handle balls while playing billiards.

I don’t see how playing billiards with you offers me anything more than simply speaking on it.” He lifted an eyebrow. “Ah, but that is the lesson, then, isn’t it?” She faltered. In so many ways. In every way.

am with my fiancé. He is off playing billiards. He often leaves me at parties. I can get a little lonely. But now I have found you! Perhaps we shall become bosom acquaintances.’ ‘Oh my dear, my bosom is too old to get acquainted with anyone,

Brisbane!” I exclaimed, only his mouth was on mine and the word was lost. After a long and thoroughly pleasurable moment, he lifted his head and I tried to catch my breath. His hand was still in a compromising spot and I returned the favour, smothering his groan with my lips. He was muttering something and I pulled away to hear it. “Forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours.” “Unless,” I began, then broke off, feeling suddenly shy. “Unless?” he prompted, his witch-black eyes glittering brilliantly in the dim light. “Unless you would like to slip upstairs now,” I murmured. “I can dismiss Morag. No one need know.” A slow smile curved his lips and he bent his head to nip my lower lip with his teeth. “Tempting, my lady. But I am engaged to play billiards with your father and your brother Benedick. They have threatened my manhood if I do not appear, and I’d rather keep that intact.” “So would I,” I said seriously. He burst out laughing and kissed me again. “Tomorrow after luncheon. The river meadow.” I nodded and he slipped out from behind Maurice, leaving me deliciously bemused. I adjusted the décolletage of my gown and waited a few seconds, then emerged. Out of the tail of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a white apron whisking around the corner. One of the maids, eavesdropping, no doubt. And I had a very good idea which.

He sucked in a breath as her hand settled on the hot steel of him. "Penelope..." The word was lost in a groan. She wanted to touch him, to learn him, to give him all the pleasure that he was giving her. "Show me how. Teach me." His eyes were black with pleasure, and he moved his other hand to guide her, showing her just how to touch, just how to stroke. When he groaned, long and lovely, she leaned forward and kissed his cheek softly, whispering against his skin. "This is much more interesting than billiards." He laughed harshly at the words. "I couldn't agree more." "You're so smooth," she said, stroking his length, marveling at the feel of him. "So hard." He closed his eyes as she touched him, and she watched his face, enjoying the play of pleasure across it. She rubbed one thumb firmly across the tip, and he gasped, his eyes opening to slits. "Do that again." She did, and he pulled her to him to kiss her long and deep as she continued her exploration, his hands on hers, showing her how to move, where to linger, how much pressure to exert. His head tilted back, and his breath came in short, pained spurts. "Is this all right?" He groaned at the question. "It's perfect. I never want you to stop." She was not interested in stopping. She loved watching him take pleasure.