Ashtray Quotes

Fair enough, that's what most people look for to begin with, but money can be a sliding scale, the more you have, the more you want, the more you need,' McBlane said as he sharpened the ash on the tip of his cigar into a point against the rim of the ashtray. It gave him the appearance of wielding a dagger as he gestured with his cigar holding hand. ~ R.D. Ronald

Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time - when pursued like a bandit - will behave like one; always remaining one county or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you. At some point you have to stop because it won't. You have to admit that you can't catch it. That you're not supposed to catch it. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray. ~ Helen Rowland

4. Or else:
Rough draft of a letter

I think of you, often
sometimes I go back into a cafe, I ist near the door, I order a coffee
I arrange my packet of cigarettes, a box of matches, a writing pad, my felt-pen on the fake marble table
I Spend a long time stirring my cup of coffee with the teasspoon
(yet I don't put any sugar in my coffee, I drink it allowing the sugar to melt in my mouth, like the people of North, like the Russians and Poles when they drink tea)
I pretend to be precoccupied, to be reflecting, as if I had a decision to make
At the top and to the right of the sheet of paaper, I inscribe the date, sometimes the place, sometimes the time, I pretend to be writing a letter

I write slowly, very slowly, as slowly as I can, I trace, I draw each letter, each accent, I check the punctuation marks

I stare attentively at a small notice, the price-list for ice-creams, at a piece of ironwork, a blind, the hexagonal yellow ashtray (in actual fact, it's an equilaterial triangle, in the cutoff corners of which semi-circular dents have been made where cigarettes can be rested)

(...)

Outside there's a bit of sunlight
the cafe is nearly empty
two renovatior's men are having a rum at the bar, the owner is dozing behind his till, the waitress is cleaning the coffee machine

I am thinking of you
you are walking in your street, it's wintertime, you've turned up your foxf ~ Georges Perec

Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter. ~ Anna Akhmatova

I even smoke in bed. Imagine smoking a cigar in bed, reading a book. Next to your bed, there's a cigar table with a special cigar ashtray, and your wife is reading a book on how to save the environment. ~ Raul Julia

There is nothing more agreeable than having a place where one can throw on the floor as many cigar butts as one pleases without the subconscious fear of a maid who is waiting like a sentinel to place an ashtray where the ashes are going to fall. ~ Fidel Castro

Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best. ~ Italo Calvino

I simply cannot imagine why anyone would eat something slimy served in an ashtray. ~ Henry Beard

Since I called her Wednesday and told her we're coming down, Jerra's been so beside herself, you'd think I told her I was bringing Charlie Hunnam home with me. She's called seven times. If we're even ten minutes late, she'll lose her mind." "Charlie who?" "Charlie Hunnam, Jax from Sons of Anarchy. She watches that show religiously. She has a Sons of Anarchy coffee mug. A Sons of Anarchy ashtray even though she doesn't smoke. A Sons of Anarchy t-shirt. And she has a Sons of Anarchy billfold that she actually uses that says, 'What would Gemma do?' She's told Hunter that if Charlie Hunnam shows up at the door and tells her she's the woman of his dreams, she's leaving him and their kids. Hunter is usually laidback about most stuff but seeing as he's half Mexican-American, half-WASP, dark-skinned, black-haired and looks absolutely nothing like Charlie Hunnam, not to mention he's ten years older than Charlie, he, for some reason, does not find this amusing. So, head's up, babe. Do not mention Sons of Anarchy and absolutely do not mention Charlie Hunnam or sparks will fly and I promise you'll get burned. ~ Kristen Ashley

It wasn't surprising and it wasn't quite real. I kept thinking it was a bizarre mistake or a made-up story, until I called her mother, who told me how beautifully made up Marine's corpse was and urged me to see her at the funeral chapel. This with her cigarettes still in my ashtray, her hair still in my brush, her clothes still in my car, her voice still in my ears, so soon after we'd been looking at ourselves together in my mirror and she the more lithe, the more fluidly beautiful of the two ~ Rebecca Solnit

Linda grabbed an ashtray from the table and threw it at him, hitting him right above the eyebrow. Blood ran down his face and dripped on Harriet Bolson's file. ~ Henning Mankell

In the Novel

He described her mouth as full of ashes.
So when he kissed her finally
he was thinking about ashes

and the blacker rim just below
the edge of the ashtray,
and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips,

and the lips themselves, at the limit
of another darkness, farther
and far more interior.

Then the way the red,
paling, just outside those lines
caught fire and the pages caught

soon after that. Slowly at first,
but then all at once
at the scalloped brown corners of each;

like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird,
extended, then folded
in on itself; multiple,

stiffening, gone. ~ Susan Stewart

He could take one look at me- at the ashtray, the bottle, the four pots of coffee, my face, and my gut set like a stone on the white band of the towel- he could take one look at me and be pretty sure i ran on heavy fuel. ~ Martin Amis

I had a dream about you. You had just died, and I was debating putting your body into either a coffin or a shoebox. My decision was based solely on spatial concerns, so I chose the ashtray, because I thought it best to smoke your essence like a cigarette. ~ Jarod Kintz

I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight. The lyric cast of the sun, the teeming fields with tall plants nodding away under the intense midafternoon heat, the squeak of our wooden floors, or the scrape of the clay ashtray pushed ever so lightly on the marble slab that used to sit on my nightstand. I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn't dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but I didn't care to read the signposts. This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. He could turn out to be a creep; he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip might ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down till nothing but fish bones remained. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I'd always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment. ~ Andre Aciman

For most of my life, I would have automatically said that I would opt for conscientious objector status, and in general, I still would. But the spirit of the question is would I ever, and there are instances where I might. If immediate intervention would have circumvented the genocide in Rwanda or stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur, would I choose pacifism? Of course not. Scott Simon, the reporter for National Public Radio and a committed lifelong Quaker, has written that it took looking into mass graves in former Yugoslavia to convince him that force is sometimes the only option to deter our species' murderous impulses.

While we're on the subject of the horrors of war, and humanity's most poisonous and least charitable attributes, let me not forget to mention Barbara Bush (that would be former First Lady and presidential mother as opposed to W's liquor-swilling, Girl Gone Wild, human ashtray of a daughter. I'm sorry, that's not fair. I've no idea if she smokes.) When the administration censored images of the flag-draped coffins of the young men and women being killed in Iraq - purportedly to respect "the privacy of the families" and not to minimize and cover up the true nature and consequences of the war - the family matriarch expressed her support for what was ultimately her son's decision by saying on Good Morning America on March 18, 2003, "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? I mean it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something ~ David Rakoff

My ashtray is full, the carton of cigarettes is empty, and I just cremated grandpa. But I never inhaled - or told him I loved him. ~ Jarod Kintz

Stubbed it out in the ashtray she had been using before, for her equally ~ Javier Marias

Rules are, like an ashtray-in-progress, meant to be thrown, poked and reshaped to suit yourself. ~ Sara Genn

This book is written from a changing town in Virginia, but this class of mine, these people
the ones who smell like an ashtray in the checkout line, devour a carton of Little Debbies at a sitting, and praise Jesus for a truck with no spare tire
exist in every state in our nation. Maybe the next time we on the left encounter such seemingly self-screwing, stubborn, God-obsessed folks, we can be open to their trials, understand the complexity of their situation, even have enough solidarity to pop for a cheap retread tire out of our own pockets, simply because that would be the kind thing to do and surely would make the ghosts of Joe Hill, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mohandas Gandhi smile. ~ Joe Bageant

It doesn't bother me," I said. "If you don't mind looking forty years old at twenty, smelling like an ashtray, and getting lung cancer, why should I? ~ Michelle Hodkin

A rental car is basically an ashtray on wheels. ~ Scott Adams

The sky was so clear that the starlight cast shadows, and so many sparkles and glitters and glints appeared above us that it looked like something really expensive had been dropped and shattered in heaven - God's Steuben ashtray, maybe. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

I have a soft spot for Joe Biden. I like him. But he's dumb as an ashtray. ~ Roger Ailes

A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray.
Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present. ~ Alain De Botton

She stubs out her cigarette in the brown glass ashtray, then settles herself against him, ear to his chest. She likes to hear his voice this way, as if it begins not in his throat but in his body, like a hum or a growl, or like a voice speaking from deep underground. Like the blood moving through her own heart: a word, a word, a word. ~ Margaret Atwood

Look at the stars. They are not arranged; instead they seem to be scattered through the heavens like sea spray. Yet you could never criticize stars for displaying poor taste, any more than you could criticize mountain ranges for having awkward proportions. These designs are spontaneous, and yet they demonstrate the wiggly patterns of nature that are quite different from anything you would call a mess. We can't quite put our finger on what the difference is between the two, but we certainly can see the difference between a tide pool and an ashtray full of garbage. We may not be able to define the difference, but we know they are different. ~ Alan W. Watts

Would you like to know how Charlotte got those nine stitches?" I asked suddenly, in a tone of voice that sounded perfectly normal to me. "We were up at the Lake. Seymour had written to Charlotte, inviting her to come up and visit us, and her mother finally let her. What happened was, she sat down in the middle of our driveway one morning to pet Boo Boo's cat, and Seymour threw a stone at her. He was twelve. That's all there was to it.

He threw it at her because she looked so beautiful sitting there in the middle of the driveway with Boo Boo's cat. Everybody knew that for God's sake-me, Charlotte, Boo Boo, Waker, Walt, the whole family." I stared at the pewter ashtray on the coffee table. "Charlotte never said a word to him about it. Not a word." I looked up at my guest, rather expecting him to dispute me, to call me a liar. I am a liar, of course. Charlotte never did understand why Seymour threw that stone at her. My guest didn't dispute me though. ~ J.D. Salinger

Maybe I had had an illusion, I thought. I stood there a long time, gazing at the rainswept streets. Once again, I was a twelve-year-old boy staring for hours at the rain. Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.
But this had been no illusion. When I went back into the bar, a glass and an ashtray remained where she had been. A couple of lightly crushed cigarette butts were lined up in the ashtray, a faint trace of lipstick on each. I sat down and closed my eyes. Echoes of music faded away, leaving me alone. In that gentle darkness, the rain continued to fall without a sound. ~ Haruki Murakami

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray. ~ Milan Kundera

Then when he had washed the ashtray and the glass he brought out a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet in his chest. ~ Carson McCullers

It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to do me a refined aesthetic favor, had touched my sleeve and said, "I want you to meet-" and led me to Nina, who sat in the corner of a couch, her body folded Z-wise, with an ashtray at her heel, and she took a long turquoise cigarette holder from her lips and joyfully, slowly exclaimed, "Well, of all people-" and then all evening my heart felt like breaking, as I passed from group to group with a sticky glass in my fist, now and then looking at her from a distance (she did not look ... ), and listening to scraps of conversation, and overheard one man saying to another, "Funny, how they all smell alike, burnt leaf through whatever perfume they use, those angular dark-haired girls," and as it often happens, a trivial remark related to some unknown topic coiled and clung to one's own intimate recollection, a parasite of its sadness. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

She had signed her own death-warrant. He kept telling himself over and over that he was not to blame, she had brought it on herself. He had never seen the man. He knew there was one. He had known for six weeks now. Little things had told him. One day he came home and there was a cigar-butt in an ashtray, still moist at one end, still warm at the other. There were gasoline-drippings on the asphalt in front of their house, and they didn't own a car. And it wouldn't be a delivery-vehicle, because the drippings showed it had stood there a long time, an hour or more. And once he had actually glimpsed it, just rounding the far corner as he got off the bus two blocks down the other way. A second-hand Ford. She was often very flustered when he came home, hardly seemed to know what she was doing or saying at all.

He pretended not to see any of these things; he was that type of man, Stapp, he didn't bring his hates or grudges out into the open where they had a chance to heal. He nursed them in the darkness of his mind. That's a dangerous kind of a man.

If he had been honest with himself, he would have had to admit that this mysterious afternoon caller was just the excuse he gave himself, that he'd daydreamed of getting rid of her long before there was any reason to, that there had been something in him for years past now urging Kill, kill, kill. Maybe ever since that time he'd been treated at the hospital for a concussion.

("Three O'Clock") ~ Cornell Woolrich

That's how the Sukulowskis got out?" Captain Byner asked. "Yup." Joe lit a cigarette. "Where'd they end up?" Joe tossed his match in the ashtray. "You don't really want to know." Rico said, "Gentlemen, I agree with you. Freddy was a fucking asshole going after Montooth in the first place." Freddy, already aggrieved, looked even more dismayed. "You were." Rico looked Freddy in the eye and formed a circle with the thumb and index of his right hand. "Huge asshole. Size of a fucking paint can." He turned to the other men in the room. "But, gents, we can't let a nigger kill a white man. Even if it's a nigger we like, and I like Montooth Dix. I've broken bread with the man. But still. And we can't let a guy who's not in our thing kill someone who is. No matter what. Dion? Joe? You two taught ~ Dennis Lehane

You hardly know me and yet you invited me out on a date,' said Miss Dearheart. 'Why?'

Because you called me a phoney, Moist thought. You saw through me straight away. Because you didn't nail my head to the door with your crossbow. Because you have no small talk. Because I'd like to get to know you better, even though it would be like smooching an ashtray. Because I wonder if you could put into the rest of your life the passion you put into smoking a cigarette. In defiance of Miss Maccalariat I'd like to commit hanky-panky with you, Miss Adora Belle Dearheart… well, certainly hanky, and possibly panky when we get to know one another better. I'd like to know as much about your soul as you know about mine…

He said: 'Because I hardly know you.'

'If it comes to that, I hardly know you, either,' said Miss Dearheart.

'I'm rather banking on that,' said Moist. This got a smile.

'Smooth answer. Slick. Where are we really eating tonight? ~ Terry Pratchett

There also wasn't one single bit of grass or dirt outside the airport. Even the median strip was a concrete sidewalk. Where did Atlanta's pet travelers pee? Maybe city dogs just learned to use the sidewalk. We kept walking. It looked like if we crossed the road that all the cars used to get onto the highway, we might come to a planted-up area, but we also might get killed.
Finally, I just lifted Cannoli up and plopped her down on a great big ashtray built into the top of the trash barrel. "Good thing you're not a German shepherd," I said. ~ Claire Cook

I hate textbooks. I hate how they shoehorn even the most incongruous words – like 'cup' and 'bookcase,' or 'pencil' and 'ashtray' – onto the same page, and then call it 'vocabulary.' In a conversation, the language is always fluid, moving, and you have to move with it. You walk and talk and see where the words come from, and where they should go. It was in this way that I learned to count like a Viking. ~ Daniel Tammet

Every time an ashtray is missing from a hotel, they don't come looking for you. But let a diamond bracelet disappear in France and they shout John Robie, the Cat. You don't have to spend every day of your life proving your honesty, but I do. ~ John Michael Hayes

on the back steps, there's an ashtray full of cigarette butts," lucy says. "i don't think her dna's going to be a problem. or her footprints, fingerprints. the problem's him. he knows what he's doing. these days, everybody's an expert."
"no," scarpetta says. "they just think they are. ~ Patricia Cornwell

Let's try and create scenes that are about something ... About something deeper than this ashtray. ~ Martin De Maat

Whatever cleaning goes on on the planet, women do 99% of it. But see, women are not as proud of their 99% as men are of our one! We clean something up, we're gonna talk about it all year long. It might be on the news, you don't know. A woman could be out re-paving the driveway. Men actually have enough gall to walk out onto the porch and go Hey baby? Man, it's hot as hell out here! Look, don't worry about emptyin' that ashtray in the den, I done got it, all right? Did it for you, sweet pea. I'm gonna take a nap now. ~ Jeff Foxworthy

Doing the smoker's comedy act: he hunted automatically for an ashtray, didn't find one, tipped his ashes into the palm of his hand, ... ~ Patricia Nell Warren

She saw it in her mind's eye like a movie playing, the haunting memories from her childhood she couldn't seem to shake blending together into one raw, aching image. Her mother lying in a darkened room for days, her face swollen with tears. The inevitable ashtray overrun with ashes, the acrid scent of pot smoke in the air. The bed or couch or futon may have been different from year to year as Evie moved them around from apartment to commune to funky cottage, but her mother was always the same. Falling hard for some man, immersing herself in romantic fantasies that were crushed when the guy left. And the guy always left. Her mother's inability to get a grasp on reality had too often left Mischa to care for her younger sister, to care for her mother, from too young an age. She remembered shaking Evie awake, trying to get her to eat. To get up and take a shower, take her and Raine to school. No kid should have to do that. No kid should have to witness the way Evie had allowed herself to be ravaged by love. No woman should allow that to happen. ~ Eve Berlin

It's the same whether we eat margarine or don't. Dull translation jobs or fraudulent copy, it's basically the same. Sure we're tossing out fluff, but tell me, where does anyone deal in words with substance? C'mon now, there's no honest work anywhere. Just like there's no honest breathing or honest pissing."
"You were more innocent in the old days."
"Maybe so," I said, crushing out a cigarette in the ashtray. "And no doubt there's an innocent town somewhere where an innocent butcher slices innocent ham. So if you think that drinking whiskey from the middle of the morning is innocent, go ahead and drink as much as you want."
The room was treated to an extended pen-on-desktop staccato solo. ~ Haruki Murakami

You know you're going to have to stop smoking too, right?"
"I don't smoke!" It was as if Wilson had heard my thoughts moments before.
Wilson lifted an eyebrow in disbelief, and smirked at me, waiting for me to come clean.
"I don't smoke, Wilson! I just live with someone who smokes like a chimney. So I smell like an ashtray all the time. I can't help it if I reek, but thank you for noticing."
Wilson had lost his doubtful smirk, and he sighed gustily. "I'm sorry, Blue. I'm incredibly good at dropping clunkers. I don't have a big mouth, but somehow I manage to stick my foot in it quite frequently. ~ Amy Harmon

I actually did ponder doing the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie thing and get a kid from Ethiopia. But you know, I already have an ashtray. ~ Zach Braff

Six pull-tabs lay in the ashtray like scales from a mermaid. ~ Haruki Murakami

What the hell is all this I read in the papers?"
"Narrow it down for me," Alan suggested.
"I suppose it might have been a misprint," Daniel considered, frowning at the tip of his cigar before he tapped it in the ashtray he kept secreted in the bottom drawer of his desk. "I think I know my own flesh and blood well enough."
"Narrow it just a bit further," Alan requested, though he'd already gotten the drift.It was simply too good to end it too soon.
"When I read that my own son-my heir, as things are-is spending time fraternizing with a Campbell, I know it's a simple matter of misspelling. What's the girl's name?"
Along with a surge of affection, Alan felt a tug of pure and simple mischief. "Which girl is that?"
"Dammit,boy! The girl you're seeing who looks like a pixie.Fetching young thing from the picture I saw.Good bones; holds herself well."
"Shelby," Alan said, then waited a beat. "Shelby Campbell."
Dead silence.Leaning back in his chair, Alan wondered how long it would be before his father remembered to take a breath. It was a pity, he mused, a real pity that he couldn't see the old pirate's face.
"Campbell!" The word erupted. "A thieving, murdering Campbell!"
"Yes,she's fond of MacGregor's as well."
"No son of mine gives the time of day to one of the clan Campbell!" Daniel bellowed. "I'll take a strap to you, Alan Duncan MacGregor!" The threat was as empty now as it had been when Alan had been eight, but delivered in ~ Nora Roberts

Tapping While Peeling, Back These Masks Stained With Stars…

This Ashtrays My Heart,
Colored In Filters Sucked Dry From The High, The Lipsticked & Famous,
The Lovers The Haters,
The Bent Or Those Who Live In The Cage…
With Vision Sealed Tight Denying All Light..
.Left Only With Assumption From A Judge In Sleep State... ~ L V HALL

It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross. ~ Tom Stoppard

Who is the other woman whose photograph I do not have? If my mother was the first in my life, she was the last: my lover and my downfall, my hope and my despair. Her photographs I burned in an ashtray, one at a time - some might say to be rid of the evidence. Her name was Theresa Aden: Theresa like the saint; Aden like Eden, complete with snake. ~ Philip Sington

Kenneth was a sitting duck. In fewer than three years he would kneel alone in this very room, on the exact spot where he now stood, emptying the contents of his desk into cardboard boxes from the liquor store while his gaunt bitter wife reviled him in the Goldbergs' living room and choked the Goldbergs' big brass ashtray with with unfiltered cigarette butts, and if anyone were then to ask him for the secret of a happy life, he would answer: Stasis. ~ Jincy Willett

At the bakery it's just me. It's a small place. Just me and the raspberry horns and the tourtiere pies and my cigarette going in the ashtray near the black sink. Every once in a while a car passes through the dark street outside the storefont windows, but that's pretty much all I see of people while I'm there, until the end of my shift at eight when Monica shows up to open the store for the day. A solid twelve hours by myself, nothing but the radio to keep me company, and I like it just fine, being alone. It's even better in the winter, during a storm, when the snow piles up outside and no cars come by at all. Inside the bakery it's warm and there's plenty to keep my hands busy. Times like that, for all I can tell I'm the only person left on earth. I could go on making pies and watching the snow pile up until the end of time, so long as there was enough coffee on hand. I don't need company like some people seem to. ~ Ron Currie Jr.

There was a still life on Billy's bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of the dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

My dad is dead. And as I type this, by the window, on the rainy day, I am alive, yes. I am living. But sometimes it doesn't feel like I am doing it fast enough, or hard enough, or all the way. And it is times like that when I can understand wanting a cigarette in my hand, then my mouth, then my hand again. Holding the cigarette. Tending to the cigarette. Giving the cigarette what it needs. Tapping it in the ashtray. Sucking on it.
Then flicking it in the street, like it meant nothing to me. ~ Amy Fusselman

So what happens when your universe begins to get off balance, and you don't have any experience with bringing it back to center? All you can do is fight a losing battle, waiting for those walls to collapse, and your life to become one huge mystery ashtray. ~ Neal Shusterman

He found his cigar smoldering in an ashtray on the liquor cabinet and he fired it up again. The aroma gave him a sense of robust health. He smelled well-being, long life, even placid fatherhood, somewhere, in the burning leaf. ~ Don DeLillo

She extinguished her cigarette in the ashtray, where she left it to smolder in ferocious defeat. ~ John Herrick

Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble. ~ Tom Stoppard

Your clothes smell heavily of clothing. Your den is filled with low-hanging palls of fresh air. The only rattle in your car is the sound of toll change in the ashtray. The absence of telltale tobacco stains on your shirt collar tells the tale - you've licked the smoking habit. ~ Robert Breault

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the as**sembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors' dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and he ~ Emily St. John Mandel

He enjoyed dancing with a fair stranger, enjoyed the vacuous, chaste talk, through which you listen closely to that bewitching, vague something going on inside you and inside her, which will last a couple of bars more and then, finding no resolution, will vanish forever and be utterly forgotten. But while the bond of bodies is still unbroken, the outlines of a potential love affair begin to form, and the rough draft already comprises everything: the sudden silence between two people in some dimly lit room; the man carefully placing with trembling fingers on the edge of an ashtray the just-lit bit impedient cigarette; the woman's eyes slowly closing in as in a film scene.. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Grab something off the shelf that's on the spaceship-an ashtray, it doesn't matter what. Because I can tell you, if they flew here from another galaxy, no matter what you've pulled off the shelf, it'll be unlike anything we have on Earth. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson