Ashtrays Quotes

In the same way that the stewards on the Titanic were more concerned about the unemptied ashtrays on the bar than the enormous hole in the side of the ship which was letting in zillions of gallons of water, I too was worrying about the unimportant and ignoring the vital. Sometimes it's easier that way. Because although there was little I could do about the huge hole, it was within my power to empty an asthray. ~ Marian Keyes

My family would be supportive if I said I wanted to be a Martian, wear only banana skins, make love to ashtrays, and eat tree bark. ~ Casey Affleck

When the ramp leveled off, he was met by a scarred farmhouse table surrounded by a mishmash of twenty chairs, scattered at all angles as if a seated crowd had sprinted into the night. Past the dozens of half-finished wine bottles. Past the coffee cup ashtrays. Past dried-out lime wedges, empty bottles of stronger spirits, and fruit-flyed glasses. Past the residue of drugs, the residue of nights. Past it all was the wonder of what could be hidden if this much was left to be found. ~ Will Chancellor

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

In the same way that the stewards of the Titanic were more concerned about the unemptied ashtrays on the bar than the enormous hole in the side of the ship which was letting in zillions of gallons of water, I too was worrying about the unimportant and ignoring the vital. ~ Marian Keyes

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

Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled 'the past,' and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

There were moments ... when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart. ~ May Sarton

Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime. ~ Lucia Berlin

Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings. ~ Gunter Grass

The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo would have been distressed by its proportions, which were neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry, other than that all parts of the room were pretty much equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of which were sharing their tasks with each other. The walls were painted in almost precisely that shade of green which Rafaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own right hand at the wrist rather than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room, would probably have returned half an hour later armed with a navigable river. ~ Douglas Adams

Over a quarter of a century ago she and Vernon had made a household for almost a year, in a tiny rooftop flat on the rue de Seine. There were always damp towels on the floor then, and cataracts of her underwear tumbling from drawers she never closed, a big ironing board that was never folded away, and in the one overfilled wardrobe dresses , crushed and shouldering sideways like commuters on the metro. Magazines, makeup, bank statements, bead necklaces, flowers, knickers, ashtrays, invitations, tampons, LPs, airplane tickets, high heeled shoes- not a single surface was left uncovered by something of Molly's, so that when Vernon was meant to be working at home, he took to writing in a cafe along the street. And yet each morning she arose fresh from the shell of this girly squalor, like a Botticelli Venus, to present herself, not naked, of course, but sleekly groomed, at the offices of Paris Vogue. ~ Ian McEwan

We were so poor; the ultimate luxury in our house at the time was ashtrays without advertisements. ~ Chic Murray

The lounge is empty of bodies but full of debris: wineglasses, ashtrays, food wrappers, and a pair of silk boxer shorts over the Boer War rifle ~ David Mitchell

There were no ashtrays and no sign of my philosophic cowpoke. I sensed he had been heading this way and most likely, spotting the spanking new paint job, just kept on going. I looked around. Nothing to hold me here, either, not even the dried carcass of a dead bee. ~ Patti Smith

When she was older, after ten or so, she could tell she was being useful, but as a small child she was tolerated (only just, she knew) by this whirlwind of efficiency that was her mother organizing a party. Still she insisted on arranging fruit on a dish, or disposing ashtrays around the house, while her mother reduced her pace to Alice's. At least while "helping," Alice did not feel quite so much as if she were a tiny creature on top of a great wave, frantically and hopelessly signalling to her mother, who stood indifferently on the shore, not noticing her. ~ Doris Lessing

You are only as deep
as the ashtrays you use. You only stick around because you like the abuse. ~ Kris Kidd

Junior colleges are high schools with ashtrays. ~ Adam Carolla

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

In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays. ~ John Lanchester

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

During my drinking decades, I lived like a pig. My room was a hazardous pile of stilettos, tube tops, wine bottles, ashtrays, and old magazines. I valued nothing. Everything that came into my life was disposable: clothes, opportunities, people. My bedroom looked as if my insides had spilled out onto the floor. ~ Glennon Melton

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

I never was one to go into an office and write. For one thing, I had a job. I was cleaning the ashtrays and setting up the studios at Columbia for a couple of years and working every other week down in the Gulf of Mexico flying helicopters. I didn't really get to just write songs for about five years. ~ Kris Kristofferson

It was a dead hole, smelling of synthetic leather and disinfectant, both of which odors seemed to emanate from the torn scratched material of the seats that lined the three walls. It smelled of the tobacco ashes which had flooded the two standing metal ashtrays. On the chromium lip of one, a cigar butt gleamed wetly like a chewed piece of beef. There was the smell of peanut shells and of the waxy candy wrappers that littered the floor, the smell of old newspapers, dry, inky, smothering and faintly like a urinal, the smell of sweat from armpits and groins and backs and faces, pouring out and drying up in the lifeless air, the smell of clothes - cleaning fluids imbedded in fabric and blooming horribly in the warm sweetish air, picking at the nostrils like thorns - all the exudations of the human flesh, a bouquet of animal being, flowing out, drying up, but leaving a peculiar and ineradicable odor of despair in the room as though chemistry was transformed into spirit, an ascension of a kind,
…Light issuing from spotlights in the ceiling was sour and blinding like a sick breath.
There was in that room an underlying confusion in the function of the senses. Smell became color, color became smell. Mute started at mute so intently they might have been listening with their eyes, and hearing grew preternaturally acute, yet waited only for the familiar syllables of surnames. Taste died, mouth opened in the negative drowsiness of waiting. ~ Paula Fox

All people start to
come apart finally
and there it is:
just empty ashtrays in a room
or wisps of hair on a comb
in the dissolving moonlight. ~ Charles Bukowski

Quoyle remembered purple-brown seckle pears the size and shape of figs, his father taking the meat off with pecking bites, the smell of fruit in their house, litter of cores and peels in the ashtrays, the grape cluster skeletons, peach stones like hens' brains on the windowsill, the glove of banana peel on the car dashboard. In the sawdust on the basement workbench galaxies of seeds and pits, cherry stones, long white date pits like spaceships ... The hollowed grapefruit skullcaps, cracked globes of tangerine peel. ~ Annie Proulx

Some people just wanted to blow it all to hell, animal, vegetable and mineral. They wanted a Vietnam they could fit into their car ashtrays. ~ Michael Herr

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom. ~ Thomas Harris

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

... a tiny room, furnished in early MFI, of which every surface was covered in china ornaments and plaster knick-knacks whose only virtue was that they were small, and therefore of limited individual horribleness. Cumulatively, they were like an infestation. Little vases, ashtrays, animals, shepherdesses, tramps, boots, tobys, ruined castles, civic shields of seaside towns, thimbles, bambis, pink goggle-eyed puppies sitting up and begging, scooped-out swans plainly meant to double as soap dishes, donkeys with empry panniers which ought to have held pin-cushions or perhaps bunches of violets -- all jostled together in a sad visual cacophony of bad taste and birthday presents and fading holiday memories, too many to be loved, justifying themselves by their sheer weight of numbers as 'collections' do. ~ Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the transit cranes stood in rows at the marine terminal and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays
all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality ... ~ Don DeLillo