Rain earned itself a quiz a while back for being cool, and smoking is at least as cool as rain. One hundred appropriate quotations to identify. A liberal sprinkling of non-fiction. Translations marked [*].


The authors:

Edward Abbey, Kingsley Amis, Hans Christian Andersen

J. S. Bach, Honoré de Balzac, J. M. Barrie, John Barth, Brendan Behan, Lucia Berlin, R. D. Blackmore, Patrick O’Brien, Tim O’Brien, Charlotte Bronte, John Buchan, Pearl S. Buck, Charles Bukowski, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Robert Burton

Albert Camus, John Le Carré, Lewis Carroll, Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Emil Cioran, James Clavell, John Collier, James Fenimore Cooper, Michael Crichton

Roald Dahl, Daniel Defoe, Len Deighton, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, Charles M. Doughty, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas

T. S. Eliot

William Faulkner, Helen Fielding, Gustave Flaubert, Ian Fleming

Graham Greene

Dashiell Hammett, Helene Hanff, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Russell Hoban, E. W. Hornung, Michel Houellebecq, Thomas Hughes

Ben Jonson

Nikos Kazatzakis, Garrison Keillor, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Soren Kierkegaard, Rudyard Kipling

Charles Lamb, Jack London

Thomas Mann, Ik Marvel, Cormac McCarthy, Herman Melville, H. L. Mencken, Edna St Vincent Millay, Spike Milligan

George Orwell

Mervyn Peake, Fernando Pessoa, H. Beam Piper, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Portis, Thomas Pynchon

Ayn Rand, Erich Maria Remarque, Tom Robbins, Damon Runyon

J. D. Salinger, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Varlam Shalamov, Laurence Sterne, Georges Simenon, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Wallace Stevens, Rex Stout

Dylan Thomas, J. R. R. Tolkien, Mark Twain

John Updike

Jules Verne

David Foster Wallace, Evelyn Waugh, H. W. Wells, Oscar Wilde, P. G. Wodehouse, T. H. White, A. N. Wilson

1)
— Do you smoke?

— Well, yes, I must admit I smoke.

— I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is.


2)
Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.

Does that mean that chain smokers are religious fanatics? You must admit there’s a similarity.

The lung of the smoker is a naked virgin thrown as a sacrifice into the godfire.


3)
There, on a table, surrounded at some distance by a large and luxurious divan, every species of tobacco known, — from the yellow tobacco of Petersburg to the black of Sinai, and so on along the scale from Maryland and Porto-Rico, to Latakia, — was exposed in pots of crackled earthenware of which the Dutch are so fond; beside them, in boxes of fragrant wood, were ranged, according to their size and quality, pueros, regalias, havanas, and manillas; and, in an open cabinet, a collection of German pipes, of chibouques, with their amber mouth-pieces ornamented with coral, and of narghiles, with their long tubes of morocco, awaiting the caprice or the sympathy of the smokers. Albert had himself presided at the arrangement, or, rather, the symmetrical derangement, which, after coffee, the guests at a breakfast of modern days love to contemplate through the vapor that escapes from their mouths, and ascends in long and fanciful wreaths to the ceiling.

[*]


4)
“Let me tell you about this guy,” said Harvey, pointing a fork at me. “The first time I ever saw him was in Frankfurt. He was sitting in a new white Jensen sports car that was covered in mud with a sensational blonde, sensational. He was wearing very old clothes, smoking a Gaulois cigarette and listening to a Beethoven quartet on the car radio and I thought, Oh boy, just how many ways can you be a snob simultaneously? Well, this guy — ” he paused for a moment to remember the name I was using — “well, this guy Dempsey knew.”


5)
There was a large mushroom growing near her, about the same height as herself; and when she had looked under it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it.

She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of the mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large blue caterpillar, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded, quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else.

6)
I wake up at about five o’clock in the morning, sometimes six; my need is at its height, it’s the most painful moment in my day. The first thing I do is turn on the electric coffee maker; the previous evening I filled the water container with water and the coffee filter with ground coffee (usually Malongo, I’m still quite particular where coffee is concerned). I don’t smoke a cigarette before taking my first sip, it’s an obligation that I impose upon myself, a daily success that has become my chief source of pride (here I must admit, having said this, that electric coffee makers work quickly). The relief that comes from the first puff is immediate, startlingly violent. Nicotine is a perfect drug, a simple, hard drug that brings no joy, defined entirely by a lack, and by the cessation of that lack.

[*]


7)
Whene’er I take my pipe and stuff it
And smoke to pass the time away,
My thoughts, as there I sit and puff it,
Dwell on a picture sad and grey:
It tells me that of similar stripe
Am I myself, to this my pipe.

[*]


8)
What use to make of the tobacco I knew not, in my distemper, or whether it was good for it or no: but I tried several experiments with it, as if I was resolved it should hit one way or other. I first took a piece of leaf, and chewed it in my mouth, which, indeed, at first almost stupefied my brain, the tobacco being green and strong, and that I had not been much used to. Then I took some and steeped it an hour or two in some rum, and resolved to take a dose of it when I lay down; and lastly, I burnt some upon a pan of coals, and held my nose close over the smoke of it as long as I could bear it, as well for the heat as almost for suffocation.


9)
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water.


10)
‘I just want to talk,’ she said.

What could I do but invite her in? My bed had been made into a sofa while I stood in the corridor, and we sat down side by side. I offered her a cigarette. It was an ordinary Senior Service, but she turned it over as though it were something special she had never seen before.

‘You don’t mind, do you, if I smoke one of my own?’ She took a tin marked Eucalyptus-and-Menthol Lozenges out of her bag and picked from it an anonymous cigarette which looked as though it had been home-rolled. On second thoughts she offered me one, and I thought it would be a little unkind of me to refuse. It was a very small cigarette, and it looked rather grubby. It had an odd herbal flavour, not disagreeable.

‘I’ve never smoked an American cigarette before,’ I said.

11)
It was about eleven when Sebastian, without warning, turned the car into a cart-track and stopped. It was hot enough now to make us seek the shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine – as Sebastian promised, they were delicious together – and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.

“Just the place to bury a crock of gold,” said Sebastian. “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”


12)
Her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed the impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a cigarette in her mouth.

[*]


13)
I said, ‘2 cuts hash and 50 rizlas each. Our meat your meat 2ce. Eat here sleap here eat for the out path and safe crowd to the nex fents.’ Not that the Big 2 ever meatit nor slep at our fents but thats what you said.

Goodparley said, ‘Done.’

I give the hash and the rizlas then we all roalt up and smoakit. Smelling the rain and lissening to it dumming on the thatch. Outside the littl kids wer stil zanting in the puddls they wer singing:

No rumpa no dum
No zantigen Eusa cum


14)
“I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind — and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”


15)
Within minutes, Amy had relaxed enough to notice that the others were drinking, and she promptly demanded a “green drop drink” — her term for a martini with an olive — and a cigarette. She was allowed this on special occasions such as departmental parties, and Elliot now gave her a drink and a cigarette.

But the excitement proved too much for her: an hour later, she was quietly looking out the window and signing *Nice picture* to herself when she vomited. She apologized abjectly, *Amy sorry Amy mess Amy Amy sorry*.

“It’s all right, Amy,” Elliot assured her, stroking the back of her head. Soon afterward, signing *Amy sleep now*, she twisted the blankets into a nest on the floor and went to sleep, snoring loudly through her broad nostrils. Lying next to her, Elliot thought, how do other gorillas get to sleep with this racket?

16)
I do not believe that there was ever an Aunt Tabithy who could abide cigars. My Aunt Tabithy hated them with a peculiar hatred. She was not only insensible to the rich flavor of a fresh rolling volume of smoke, but she could not so much as tolerate the sight of the rich russet color of an Havana-labeled box. It put her out of all conceit with Guava jelly, to find it advertised in the same tongue, and with the same Cuban coarseness of design.

She could see no good in a cigar.

“But by your leave, my aunt,” said I to her the other morning — “there is very much that is good in a cigar.”

My aunt, who was sweeping, tossed her head, and with it, her curls — done up in paper.

“It is a very excellent matter,” continued I, puffing.


17)
He picked up his cigar from the lip of the copper ashtray where he had placed it. It was now only about two inches in length but was still burning. He took a deep drag on it, as if it were a kind of respirator in an otherwise oxygenless world.


18)
At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18—, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisième, No. 33, Rue Dunôt, Faubourg St. Germain. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence; while each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and exclusively occupied with the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber.


19)
— I may smoke one pipe of asthma mixture.

— In the woodshed, if you please.


20)
Gately’s found he can get away with smoking in the Aventura if he opens the passenger window too and makes sure no ashes go anywhere. The cross-wind through the open car is brutal. He smokes menthols. He’d switched to menthols at four months clean because he couldn’t stand them and the only people he knew that smoked them were Niggers and he’d figured that if menthols were the only gaspers he let himself smoke he’d be more likely to quit. And now he can’t stand anything but menthols, which Calvin T. says are even worse for you because they got little bits of asbestosy shit in the filter and whatnot. But Gately had been living in the little male live-in Staffer’s room down in the basement by the audio pay phone and tonic machines for like two months before it turned out the Health guy came and inspected and said all the big pipes up at the room’s ceiling were insulated in ancient asbestos that was coming apart and asbestosizing the room, and Gately had to move all his shit and the furniture out into the open basement and guys in white suits with oxygen tanks went in and stripped everything off the pipes and went over the room with what smells like it was a flamethrower. Then hauled the decayed asbestos down to E.W.D. in a welded drum with a skull on it. So Gately figures menthol gaspers are probably the least of his lung-worries at this point.

21)
“ . . . That’s a good ash — what sort of brown beauty have you there?”

“Maria Mancini, Postre de Banquett, Bremen, Herr Hofrat. Costs little or nothing, nineteen pfennigs in plain colours — but a bouquet you don’t often come across at the price. Sumatra-Havana wrapper, as you see. I am very wedded to them. It is a medium mixture, very fragrant, but cool on the tongue. Suits it to leave the ash long, I don’t knock it off more than a couple of times. She has her whims, of course, has Maria; but the inspection must be very thorough, for she doesn’t vary much, and draws perfectly even. May I offer you one?”

[*]


22)
He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful.


23)
“ . . . The Mystery of the Small Attaché Case. Sounds quite promising!”

“I will give you yet another suggestion for a title. The Mystery of the Smell of Cigarette Smoke.”

“A bit clumsy for a title. Smell — eh? Was that why you were sniffing so when we first examined the body? I saw you — and heard you! Sniff — sniff — sniff. Thought you had a cold in your head.”

“You were entirely in error.”


24)
I took the cigar which was offered me; its shape recalled the London ones, but it seemed to be made of leaves of gold. I lighted it at a little brazier, which was supported upon an elegant bronze stem, and drew the first whiffs with the delight of a lover of smoking who has not smoked for two days.

“It is excellent, but it is not tobacco.”

[*]


25)
He got up and went to the bar, wondering how he was going to plough on through this and other evenings. He ordered the drinks and had a brain-wave. He would break the ice! By hook or by crook he would become the life and soul of the party! He asked for a tumbler and that its rim should be dipped in water. Then he picked up a paper cocktail napkin and went back to the table. He sat down. ‘Now,’ he said as eyes goggled at him, ‘if we were paying for our drinks, I’ll show you how we’d decide who should pay. I learned this in the Army.’ He placed the tumbler in the middle of the table, opened the paper napkin and spread the centre tightly over the top so that it clung to the moist edge of the glass. He took his small change out of his pocket, selected a five-centime piece, and dropped it gently on to the centre of the stretched tissue. ‘Now then,’ he announced, remembering that the last time he had played this game had been in the dirtiest bar in Singapore. ‘Who else smokes? We need three others with lighted cigarettes.’

26)
— Thanks for the smoke, Mr Dunlavin.

— Not at all, sure, you’re welcome, call again when you’re passing. But remember the next wife you kill and you getting forty fags a day in the condemned cell, think of them as is not so fortunate as yourself and leave a few dog-ends around the exercise yard after you.


27)
Kuffner puckered his mouth, and the mustache was a parenthesis lying on its back. His hand went automatically to his side pocket and came out with a cigarette case. He opened it and removed one, looked at it and became aware of it, and asked, “May I smoke?”

“No,” Wolfe said flatly.

That was by no means a hard and fast rule. It had been relaxed not only for some men, but even for a few women, not necessarily prospective clients. Kuffner was frustrated and confused. A performance of a basic habit had been arbitrarily stopped, and also he had a problem. Taking a cigarette from a metal case with a clamp needs only a flick of a finger and thumb, but putting one back in is more complicated. He solved it by returning the case to his left side pocket and putting the cigarette in his right one. He was trying not to be flustered, but his voice showed it. “It was Miss Angela Wright.”


28)
One ought to be a mystery, not only to others, but also to one’s self. I study myself; when I am weary of this, then for a pastime I light a cigar and think: the Lord only knows what He meant by me, or what He would make out of me.

[*]


29)
Afterwards by the fireside he kept us very merry, sitting in the great chimney-corner, and making us play games with him. And all the while he was smoking tobacco in a manner I never had seen before, not using any pipe for it, but having it rolled in little sticks about as long as my finger, blunt at one end and sharp at the other. The sharp end he would put in his mouth, and lay a brand of wood to the other, and then draw a white cloud of curling smoke, and we never tired of watching him.


30)
I approached Gilray, then, and without a word handed him my pouch, while the others drew nearer. Nothing was to be heard but the water oozing out and in beneath the house-boat. Gilray pushed the tobacco from him, as he might have pushed a bag of diamonds that he mistook for pebbles. I placed it against his arm, and motioned to the others not to look. Then I sat down beside Gilray, and almost smoked into his eyes. Soon the aroma reached him, and rapture struggled into his face. Slowly his fingers fastened on the pouch. He filled his pipe without knowing what he was doing, and I handed him a lighted spill. He took perhaps three puffs, and then gave me a look of reverence that I know well. It only comes to a man once in all its glory — the first time he tries the Arcadia Mixture — but it never altogether leaves him.

“Where do you get it?” Gilray whispered, in hoarse delight.

The Arcadia had him for its own.

31)
Late in the morning, close to noon, the sun comes glowering over the wall in a burst of fire and we are driven out of our sacks. Into the green lagoon for a bath and a swim and then Ralph baits a hook with the reliable rotten salami, I build a campfire in the shade and fill the skillet with grease, and once again we dine on channel cat — delicious fish!

After this combined breakfast and dinner we retire to the water again and deeper shade, evading the worst of the midday heat. Naked as savages, we float on our backs in the still water, squat on the cool sand under the sheltering cottonwood and smoke like sachems. We may not have brought enough food but at least we’ve got plenty of Bull Durham.


32)
His head was well back. His long, bulging chin pointed to the ceiling like a loaf of bread. His eyes followed lugubriously the wavering ascent of a fresh smoke-ring until it was absorbed into the upper billows. There was a kind of ripeness in his indolence, in his dreadful equability.


33)
Yevgenia Ustinovna, senior surgeon, had none of the traits usually ascribed to members of her profession, none of the resolute look, determined lines across the forehead or iron clenching of the jaw, and her appearance as a whole lacked that straightforward wisdom. Although already in her fifties, if she piled her hair on top of her head inside her doctor’s cap men who saw her from behind would call out, “Excuse me, Miss, er . . . ” She was, as the saying is, a Young Pioneer from behind and an old-age pensioner from in front, with her drooping lower eyelids, puffed-up eyes and perpetually weary-looking face. She tried to make up for this by using lots of bright lipstick, but she had to put it on more than once a day because it always rubbed off on the cigarettes she smoked.

Every moment she was not in the operating theater, the surgical dressing room or the ward, she had a cigarette in her mouth. She would seize every opportunity to dash out and fling herself on a cigarette as though she wanted to eat it. During her rounds she would sometimes raise her first two fingers to her lips. So one might perhaps argue that she smoked even during her rounds.

[*]


34)
Verdict. The *a priori* opinion of that juror who smokes the worst cigars.


35)
The manly lover was filling his pipe. I happened to be watching him as he very carefully packed the tobacco into the bowl from a yellow oilskin pouch. He had just finished doing this and was about to light up when the ancient half-sister called on him to come swimming. So he put down the pipe and off he went.

I stared at the pipe that was lying there on the rocks. About twelve inches away from it, I saw a little heap of dried goat’s droppings, each one small and round like a pale brown berry, and at that point, an interesting idea began to sprout in my mind.

36)
So Rose Viola opens one night at the Pigeon Club, and she is working on the dance floor close to the tables, and doing the same act she does in burlesque, when a large young character who is sitting at one of the front tables with a bunch of other young characters, including several nice-looking Judys, reaches out and touches Rose Viola with the end of a cigarette in a spot she just unzippers.


37)
He trotted off, and I lit a nonchalant cigarette, calm and collected to the eyebrows.


38)
The apartment was very far removed from the old man’s chamber, but Mr Quilp deemed it prudent, as a precaution against infection from fever, and a means of wholesome fumigation, not only to smoke, himself, without cessation, but to insist upon it that his legal friend did the like. Moreover, he sent an express to the wharf for the tumbling boy, who arriving with all despatch was enjoined to sit himself down in another chair just inside the door, continually to smoke a great pipe which the dwarf had provided for the purpose, and to take it from his lips under any pretence whatever, were it only for one minute at a time, if he dared. These arrangements completed, Mr Quilp looked round him with chuckling satisfaction, and remarked that he called that comfort.


39)
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.


40)
He reached out for and put on his glasses. At once he saw that something was wrong with the bedclothes immediately before his face. Endangering his chances of survival, he sat up a little, and what met his bursting eyes roused to a frenzy the timpanist in his head. A large, irregular area of the turned-back part of the sheet was missing; a smaller but still considerable area of the turned-back part of the blanket was missing; an area about the size of the palm of his hand in the main part of the top blanket was missing. Through the three holes, which, appropriately enough, had black borders, he could see a dark brown mark on the second blanket. He ran a finger round a bit of the hole in the sheet, and when he looked at his finger it bore a dark-grey stain. That meant ash; ash meant burning; burning must mean cigarettes. Had this cigarette burnt itself out on the blanket? If not, where was it now? Nowhere on the bed; nor in it. He leaned over the side, gritting his teeth; a sunken brown channel, ending in a fragment of discoloured paper, lay across a light patch in the pattern of a valuable-looking rug.

41)
“You like a cigarette? Sir,” the King said, offering the pack.

The last time Grey had had a tailor-made cigarette was two years before, on his birthday. His twenty-second birthday. He stared at the pack and wanted one, wanted them all. “No,” he said grimly. “I don’t want one of your cigarettes.”


42)
I went into the darkened smoking-room where the rays of morning light were beginning to creep through the shutters. There I breakfasted off a whisky-and-soda and some biscuits from the cupboard. By this time it was getting on for six o’clock. I put a pipe in my pocket and filled my pouch from the tobacco jar on the table by the fireplace.

As I poked into the tobacco my fingers touched something hard, and I drew out Scudder’s little black pocket-book. . . .


43)
The following will illustrate how we drummed up business in the graft of passing the punk. A row of newcomers is installed in your cells. You pass along before the bars with your punk. “Hey, Bo, give us a light,” some one calls to you. Now this is an advertisement that that particular man has tobacco on him. You pass in the punk and go your way. A little later you come back and lean up casually against the bars. “Say, Bo, can you let us have a little tobacco?” is what you say. If he is not wise to the game, the chances are that he solemnly avers that he hasn’t any more tobacco. All very well. You condole with him and go your way. But you know that his punk will last him only the rest of that day. Next day you come by, and he says again, “Hey, Bo, give us a light.” And you say, “You haven’t any tobacco and you don’t need a light.” And you don’t give him any, either. Half an hour after, or an hour or two or three hours, you will be passing by and the man will call out to you in mild tones, “Come here, Bo.” And you come. You thrust your hand between the bars and have it filled with precious tobacco. Then you give him a light.


44)
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs.


45)
Then after the second daughter was sent away and Wang Lung was free of his anxiety about her, he said to his uncle one day:

‘Since you are my father’s brother, here is a little better tobacco for you.’

And he opened the jar of opium and the stuff was sticky and sweet smelling and Wang Lung’s uncle took it and smelled of it, and he laughed and was pleased and he said:

‘Well now, I have smoked it a little but not often before this, for it is too dear, but I like it well enough.’

And Wang Lung answered him, pretending to be careless:

‘It is only a little I bought once for my father when he grew old and could not sleep at night and I found it to-day unused and I thought: ‘There is my father’s brother, and why should he not have it before me, who am younger and do not need it yet?’ Take it then, and smoke it when you wish or when you have a little pain.’

46)
“Were the police nice to you?”

“About the way they always are.”

“I’m not keeping you from anything important, am I?”

“No.”

“All the same I don’t think you’re very pleased to see me.”

I filled a pipe and reached for the packet of paper matches. I lit the pipe carefully. She watched that with approval. Pipe smokers were solid men. She was going to be disappointed in me.


47)
Three young Ladies are peeping ’round the DoorWay, like shorebirds at the edge of the Water, stepping nicely in and out of that Aura of Tobacco-Smoke that Men for centuries have understood keeps women away as well as were they Bugs. “I’m going in,” declares the boldest of the Girls, actually then proceeding two or three steps inside, before crying, “Eehyeww!” and skipping in Retreat. Then another would try, — and “Eeyooh!” and out again, and so forth, amid an unbroken stream of close Discussion, — their desire for Romantick Mischief thus struggling with their feminine abhorrence of Tobacco.


48)
Thank you again for the beautiful book, I shall try very hard not to get gin and ashes all over it, it’s really much too fine for the likes of me.


49)
The cigarette ashes left between the pages of old books are the best remaining image of the life of the person who read them.

[*]


50)
People who claim to know say that I smoke the worst cigars in the world. They bring their own cigars when they come to my house. They betray an unmanly terror when I offer them a cigar; they tell lies and hurry away to meet engagements which they have not made when they are threatened with the hospitalities of my box. Now then, observe what superstition, assisted by a man’s reputation, can do. I was to have twelve personal friends to supper one night. One of them was as notorious for costly and elegant cigars as I was for cheap and devilish ones. I called at his house and when no one was looking borrowed a double handful of his very choicest; cigars which cost him forty cents apiece and bore red-and-gold labels in sign of their nobility. I removed the labels and put the cigars into a box with my favorite brand on it — a brand which those people all knew, and which cowed them as men are cowed by an epidemic. They took these cigars when offered at the end of the supper, and lit them and sternly struggled with them — in dreary silence, for hilarity died when the fell brand came into view and started around — but their fortitude held for a short time only; then they made excuses and filed out, treading on one another’s heels with indecent eagerness; and in the morning when I went out to observe results the cigars lay all between the front door and the gate. All except one — that one lay in the plate of the man from whom I had cabbaged the lot. One or two whiffs was all he could stand. He told me afterward that some day I would get shot for giving people that kind of cigars to smoke.

51)
“Would you mind if I ask you a question?”

“It is what I am for.”

“How did you know to set breakfast for two?”

The old gentleman leaned back in his chair and lighted an enormous meerschaum pipe (Good gracious, he breathes fire, thought the Wart, who had never heard of tobacco) before he was ready to reply. Then he looked puzzled, took off his skull-cap (three mice fell out) and scratched in the middle of his bald head.

“Have you ever tried to draw in a looking-glass?” he asked.


52)
After a short and impressive pause, Chingachgook lighted a pipe whose bowl was curiously carved in one of the soft stones of the country, and whose stem was a tube of wood, and commenced smoking. When he had inhaled enough of the fragrance of the soothing weed, he passed the instrument into the hands of the scout. In this manner the pipe had made its rounds three several times, amid the most profound silence, before either of the party opened his lips. Then the Sagamore, as the oldest and highest in rank, in a few calm and dignified words, proposed the subject for deliberation.


53)
In the days when I set off on month-long bicycle trips across France, my greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end. I think of those days as the most active period of my life.

[*]


54)
As it passes through the water, the smoke divests itself of its sooty taste, it refreshes itself, perfumes itself, without losing the essential qualities produced by burning the plant, it refines itself in the spirals of leather, and reaches the palate, pure and perfumed. It spreads across your tastebuds, it saturates them, and ascends to the brain like scented and melodious prayers rising towards heaven.

[*]


55)
The brake parts man took me up a narrow stairway. George Henley was his name: George showed me my workroom, very small, dark, just one lightbulb and one tiny window that looked out over an alley.

“Now,” he said, “you see these cartons. You put the brake shoes into the cartons. Like this.”

Mr. Henley showed me.

“We have three types of cartons, each printed differently. One carton is for our ‘Super Durable Brake Shoe’. The other is for our ‘Super Brake Shoe’. And the third is for our ‘Standard Brake Shoe’. The brake shoes are stacked right here.”

“But they all look alike to me. How can I tell them apart?”

“You don’t. They’re all the same. Just divide them into thirds. And when you finish packing all these shoes, come on downstairs and we’ll find something else for you to do. O.K.?”

“O.K. When do I start?”

“You start now. And, absolutely no smoking. Not up here. If you have to smoke, you come on downstairs, O.K.?”

“O.K.”

Mr. Henley closed the door. I heard him go down the stairs. I opened the little window and looked out at the world. Then I sat down, relaxed, and smoked a cigarette.

56)
All luggage was carefully stowed away inside the coach and in the front and hind boots, so that not a hat-box was visible outside. Five or six small boys, with pea-shooters, and the cornopean player, got up behind; in front the big boys, mostly smoking, not for pleasure, but because they are now gentlemen at large, and this is the most correct public method of notifying the fact.

“Robinson’s coach will be down the road in a minute; it has gone up to Bird’s to pick up. We’ll wait till they’re close, and make a race of it,” says the leader. “Now, boys, half a sovereign apiece if you beat ’em into Dunchurch by one hundred yards.”


57)
It was strange to see him smoking; his mouth, and throat, pharynx and nares, became visible as a sort of whirling smoke cast.

“This blessed gift of smoking!” he said, and puffed vigorously.


58)
He had taken six steps down the passage when the idiotic slogan: “If that’s what you want, you can Whiffle for it,” took possession of his brain; two steps further on, this repellent sentence had recast itself as: “All you Want by Whiffling,” and on the threshold of his own room, the first practical possibility of Whiffledom struck him like a sledgehammer.


59)
Silent pipe —
peace and quiet
in my heart


60)
It was just then that the row started in Raymond’s room.

First we heard a woman saying something in a high-pitched voice; then Raymond bawling at her, “You let me down, you bitch! I’ll learn you to let me down!” There came some thuds, then a piercing scream — it made one’s blood run cold — and in a moment there was a crowd of people on the landing. Marie and I went out to see. The woman was still screaming and Raymond still knocking her about. Marie said, wasn’t it horrible! I didn’t answer anything. Then she asked me to go and fetch a policeman, but I told her I didn’t like policemen. However, one turned up presently; the lodger on the second floor, a plumber, came up, with him. When he banged on the door the noise stopped inside the room. He knocked again, and, after a moment, the woman started crying, and Raymond opened the door. He had a cigarette dangling from his underlip and a rather sickly smile.

“Your name?” Raymond gave his name. “Take that cigarette out of your mouth when you’re talking to me,” the policeman said gruffly. Raymond hesitated, glanced at me, and kept the cigarette in his mouth. The policeman promptly swung his arm and gave him a good hard smack on the left cheek. The cigarette shot from his lips and dropped a yard away. Raymond made a wry face, but said nothing for a moment. Then in a humble tone he asked if he mightn’t pick up his cigarette.

The officer said, “Yes,” and added: “But don’t you forget, next time. We don’t take any nonsense, not from the likes of you.”

[*]

61)
In the taiga, smokers would gather and dry black-currant leaves, and there were heated convict discussions as to whether cowberry leaves or currant leaves were better. Experts maintained that both were worthless, since the body demands the poison of nicotine, not smoke, and brain cells could not be tricked by such a simple method. But currant leaf served for our “smoking breaks”, since in camp the words “rest from work” presented too glaring a contradiction with the basic principles of production ethics held in the far north. To rest every hour was both a challenge and a crime, and dried currant leaf was a natural camouflage.

[*]


62)
Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. “How now,” he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, “this smoking no longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone! . . . ”


63)
Where’s my pipe now? not fill’d! thou arrant incubee.


64)
Enheartened, he drew himself up, and faced his accusers, collecting all his dignity into a frowning brow.

Imposing silence, demanding attention, with the forefinger of his left hand, he slowly raised his right, and displayed to the astonished elders the fine old testimony of the unbroken ash.

In the breathless moment during which the significance of this simple final proof dawned upon the blacks, the smoke of the Corona rose straight up towards the roof of the arbor.


65)
He was a master of the anecdote, a fund of improbable stories, many of which for him epitomized the tragicomedy of what it meant to be Irish. One of the more bizarre ‘wheezes’ (as he habitually termed these stories and observations) concerned an occasion when he was travelling in an old-fashioned train of the kind which had no corridor, so that the passengers were imprisoned in their compartments for as long as the train was moving. He was not alone in the compartment. He found himself opposite one other character, a respectable-looking farmer in a tweed suit whose agitated manner was to be explained by the demands of nature. When the train had rattled on for a further few miles, and showed no signs of stopping at a station where a lavatory might have been available, the gentleman pulled down his trousers, squatted on the floor of the railway carriage and defecated. When this operation was complete, and the gentleman, fully clothed, was once more seated opposite Albert Lewis, the smell in the compartment was so powerful as to be almost nauseating. To vary, if not to drown the odour, Albert Lewis got a pipe from his pocket and began to light it. But at that point the stranger opposite, who had not spoken one word during the entire journey, leaned forward and censoriously tapped a sign on the window which read NO SMOKING.

66)
“You know my first cigarette was lit by a prince? Do you believe that?”

“Sure I believe it. Want a light?” He lit my cigarette and we smiled at each other. We were very close and then he passed out and I was alone in the mirror.


67)
“It was during the great banana bubble. You had to kind of force your personality and the banana peels down their throats. Sharon and I were like kids — we just smoked bananas and looked at each other and smoked more bananas and looked at each other.”


68)
He poured from the cloth sack into the creased paper as he knew, without being able to remember at all when and where he had seen the process, it should be done, watching in mild alarm as the tobacco sprayed off the paper in the light wind which blew in the window, turning his body to shelter the paper, realising that his hand was beginning to tremble though not concerned about it yet, laying the sack carefully and blindly aside, watching the tobacco as if he were holding the grains in the paper by the weight of his eyes, putting the other hand to the paper and finding they were both trembling now, the paper parting suddenly between his hands with an almost audible report. His hands were shaking badly now; he filled the second paper with a terrific concentration of will, not of desire for tobacco but just to make the cigarette; he deliberately raised his elbows from his knees and held the filled paper before his calm unshaven faintly haggard face until the trembling stopped. But as soon as he relaxed them to roll the tobacco into the paper they began to tremble again but this time he did not even pause, turning the tobacco carefully into the paper, the tobacco raining faintly and steadily from either end of the paper but the paper turning on. He had to hold it in both hands to lick it and then as soon as his tongue touched the paper his head seemed to catch from the contact the same faint uncontrollable jerking and he sat for an instant, looking at what he had accomplished — the splayed raddled tube already half empty of tobacco and almost too damp to take fire.


69)
I take out my cigarettes, break each one in half and give them to the Russians. They bow to me and then they light the cigarettes. Now red points glow in every face. They comfort me; it looks as though there were little windows in dark village cottages saying that behind them are rooms full of peace.

[*]


70)
In a kind of reverie he saw himself actually aboard the *Poseidon*, dry-breeched and warm, his gear safely stowed below. The sky was brilliant. A fresh wind from the east raised whitecaps in the sparkling ocean, threatened to lift his hat and the hats of the cordial gentlemen with whom he stood in converse on the poop, and fanned from red to yellow the coals of good tobacco in their pipes. With what grace did the crewmen race aloft to make sail! To what a chorus did the anchor rise dripping from the bottom of the sea and the mighty ship make way!

71)
Wishing to get some information from members of the WCTU in an Oregon city, I introduced myself as the secretary of the Butte City Purity League. One of them read me a long discourse on the erotic effects of cigarettes upon young girls. Subsequent experiments proved this tip worthless.


72)
He laid his files down on a corner of the desk, knocked out his pipe, which was still warm, against the window ledge, came back to sit down and automatically reached out for a different pipe to the right, where it ought to have been.

It was not there. There were three pipes, one of them a meerschaum, lying beside the ashtray, but his favourite, the one he was looking for, the one he came back to with the most pleasure and always carried about with him, a thick briar pipe with a slightly curved stem which his wife had given him for a birthday present ten years before, and which he called his good old pipe, was not there.

[*]


73)
9st 1, alcohol units 2, cigarettes 0, calories 998 (excellent, v.g., perfect saint-style person).


74)
“I will answer the second question first,” he said, “ — but bless me! this is a splendid place for smoke rings!” Indeed for a long time they could get nothing more out of him, he was so busy sending smoke rings dodging round the pillars of the hall, changing them into all sorts of different shapes and colours, and setting them at last chasing one another out of the hole in the roof. They must have looked very queer from outside, popping out into the air one after another, green, blue, red, silver-grey, yellow, white; big ones, little ones; little ones dodging through big ones and joining into figure-eights, and going off like a flock of birds into the distance.


75)
“What kind of cigarette is that?” the veteran asked presently.

“This?” Stuart examined the butt; he was almost ready to put it out and stick it away in the metal box in his pocket. The box was full of butts, which would be opened and made into new cigarettes by Tom Frandi, the local cigarette man in South Berkeley. “This,” he said, “is imported. From Marin County. It’s a special deluxe Gold Label made by — ” He paused for effect. “I guess I don’t have to tell you.”

“By Andrew Gill,” the veteran said. “Say, I’d like to buy a whole one from you; I’ll pay you a dime.”

“They’re worth fifteen cents apiece,” Stuart said. “They have to come all the way around Black Point and Sear’s Point and along the Lucas Valley Road, from beyond Nicasio somewhere.”

“I had one of those Andrew Gill special deluxe Gold Labels one time,” the veteran said. “It fell out of the pocket of some man who was getting on the ferry; I fished it out of the water and dried it.”

All of a sudden Stuart handed him the butt.

“For God’s sake,” the veteran said, not looking directly at him. He rowed more rapidly, his lips moving, his eyelids blinking.

“I got more,” Stuart said.

76)
Major Chaterjack, M.C., D.S.O., came over to see that we were being ‘looked after’; he was really a great soldier, I for one would have followed him anywhere, preferably away from the war. He was this kind of man. Autumn morning — the early sun had melted the night frost, leaving glistening damp trees. Battery parading — small wafts of steam are appearing from men’s mouths and noses — the muster roll is called — B.S.M. is about to report to Major Chaterjack: ‘Battery all correct and present, sir!’ — The roar of a plane mixed with cannon shells all over the place — M.E. 109 roof top, red propellor boss — panic — Battery as one man into ditch — not Major Chaterjack, M.C., D.S.O. — stands alone in the road — unmoved — produces a silver case, lights up a cigarette. He is smoking luxuriously as we all sheepishly rise from what now feels like the gutter. He addresses us: ‘Very good — you realise you did the right thing and I the wrong.’ What can you say to a bloke like that?


77)
“ . . . I tell you I am dead; and my one terror is of coming to life again by accident. Can’t you see? I simply dare not show my nose out of doors — by day. You have no idea of the number of perfectly innocent things a dead man daren’t do. I can’t even smoke Sullivans, because no one man was ever so partial to them as I was in my lifetime, and you never know when you may start a clew.”


78)
. . . *Three*, I hear him gasp, *three* joints? Alone up in his room? Three?

Yes, three, I answer calmly. For after this particular day I feel entitled to the 1st, I want the 2nd and oh God I *need* the 3rd! The 1st is a just payment for being good and working hard. The 2nd for enjoyment. The 3rd is to remind me to never never never again be duped into believing anything but the worst of one’s relatives. As a variation of W. C. Fields’ great truth, How can anyone who likes dogs and little children be anything *but* all bad?


79)
“Your Honors!” Gus shouted, “I know court is recessed, but please observe what Little Fuzzy is doing.”

While they watched, Little Fuzzy snapped the lighter and held the flame to the pipe bowl, puffing.

Across on the other side, Leslie Coombes swallowed once or twice and closed his eyes.


80)
But it’s cigarette smoke that most subtly, spiritually, reconstructs my past. Since it just barely grazes my awareness of taste, it evokes the moments to which I’ve died in a more general way, by a kind of displacement; it makes them more remotely present, more like mist when they envelop me, more ethereal when I embody them. A menthol cigarette or a cheap cigar wraps certain of my moments in a sweet softness. With what subtle plausibility – taste combined with smell – I recreate the dead stage settings and reinvest them with the colours of a past, always so eighteenth century in its weary and mischievous aloofness, always so medieval in its irreparable lostness!

[*]

81)
“Talk quiet,” I said. “Want a smoke?”

We smoked skilfully in the dark.

“You don’t smoke much, Signor Tenente.”

“No. I’ve just about cut it out.”

“Well,” he said, “it don’t do you any good and I suppose you get so you don’t miss it. Did you ever hear a blind man won’t smoke because he can’t see the smoke come out?”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I think it’s all bull, myself,” he said. “I just heard it somewhere. You know how you hear things.”


82)
The corporal, who the night before had resolved in his mind to supply the grand *desideratum*, of keeping up something like an incessant firing upon the enemy during the heat of the attack,— had no further idea in his fancy at that time, than a contrivance of smoking tobacco against the town, out of one of my uncle *Toby’s* six field-pieces, which were planted on each side of his sentry-box; the means of effecting which occurring to his fancy at the time same, though he had pledged his cap, he thought it in no danger from the miscarriage of his projects.

Upon turning it this way, and that, a little in his mind, he soon began to find out, that by means of his two *Turkish* tobacco-pipes, with the supplement of three smaller tubes of wash-leather at each of their lower ends, to be tagg’d by the same number of tin-pipes fitted to the touch-holes, and sealed with clay next the cannon, and then tied hermetically with waxed silk at their several insertions into the *Morocco* tube,— he should be able to fire the six field-pieces all together, and with the same ease as to fire one.


83)
May the Babylonish curse
Straight confound my stammering verse,
If I can a passage see
In this word-perplexity,
Or a fit expression find,
Or a language to my mind,
(Still the phrase is wide or scant)
To take leave of thee, GREAT PLANT!
Or in any terms relate
Half my love, or half my hate:
For I hate, yet love, thee so,
That, whichever thing I show,
The plain truth will seem to be
A constrain’d hyperbole,
And the passion to proceed
More from a mistress than a weed.


84)
He displayed the cigarette holder grandly on every occasion and had learned to manipulate it adroitly. Unwittingly, he had discovered deep within himself a fertile aptitude for smoking with a cigarette holder. As far as he could tell, his was the only cigarette holder in the whole Mediterranean theater of operations, and the thought was both flattering and disquieting.


85)
Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher’s stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases. A good vomit, I confess, a virtuous herb, if it be well qualified, opportunely taken, and medicinally used; but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, ’tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.

86)
He said, “What do you want, girl? Speak up. It is suppertime.”

I said, “Let me show you how to do that.” I took the half-made cigarette and shaped it up and licked it and sealed it and twisted the ends and gave it back to him. It was pretty loose because he had already wrinkled the paper. He lit it and it flamed up and burned about halfway down.

I said, “Your makings are too dry.”

He studied it and said, “Something.”


87)
Tobacco is this world’s bliss of many in the idle desert, against whom the verses of a Beduin maker are currently recited in all their tribes: “For three things a man should not ‘drink’ smoke: is not he a sot that will burn his own fingers (in taking up a coal from the hearth to lay it in his pipe-head), and he that willingly wasteth his substance (spending for that which is not bread), and withal he doth it ungodly.”


88)
I took my pipe. I looked at it with emotion. It was a big and precious one, “Made in England”. It was a present from my friend — the one who had greyish-green eyes and slender fingers. That was abroad, years ago. He had finished his studies and was leaving that evening for Greece. “Give up cigarettes,” he said. “You light one, you smoke half of it and throw the rest away. Your love only lasts a minute. It’s disgraceful. You’d better take up a pipe. It’s like a faithful spouse. When you go home, it’ll be there, quietly waiting for you. You’ll light it, you’ll watch the smoke rising in the air — and you’ll think of me!”

[*]


89)
Dear L & M —

This is it. They saw us. I have one left and am smokng it now. Gd it tastes gd. My last cg. Then its all over. I’m OK. I’m ready. Its a better thng I do now than I hv ever done. I love you both. . . .


90)
Stephen sent Cheslin for lancets, cigars, the galley bellows; and as the lifeless Henry Ellis rose free of the deck so he swung him forwards two or three times, face down and tongue lolling, and emptied some water out of him. ‘Hold him just so,’ he said, and bled him behind the ears. ‘Mr Ricketts, pray be so good as to light me this cigar.’ And what part of the Sophie’s crew that was not wholly occupied with the fishing of the sprung yard, the bending of the sail afresh and swaying all up, with the continual trimming of the sails and with furtively peering at the frigate, had the inexpressible gratification of seeing Dr Maturin draw tobacco smoke into the bellows, thrust the nozzle into his patient’s nose, and while his assistant held Ellis’ mouth and other nostril closed, blow the acrid smoke into his lungs, at the same time swinging his suspended body so that now his bowels pressed upon his diaphragm and now they did not. Gasps, choking, a vigorous plying of the bellows, more smoke, more and steadier gasps, coughing. ‘You may cut him down now,’ said Stephen to the fascinated seamen. ‘It is clear that he was born to be hanged.’

91)
“What are you going to do, then?” I asked.

“To smoke,” he answered. “It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.”


92)
She reaches for his hand, and he lets her
take it. Why not? Where’s the harm?
Let her. His mind’s made up. She covers his
fingers with kisses, tears fall onto his wrist.

He draws on his cigarette and looks at her
as a man would look indifferently on
a cloud, a tree, or a field of oats at sunset.
He narrows his eyes against the smoke. From time
to time he uses the ashtray as he waits
for her to finish weeping.


93)
I walked a while on the pavement; but a subtle, well-known scent — that of a cigar — stole from some window; I saw the library casement open a handbreadth; I knew I might be watched thence; so I went apart into the orchard. No nook in the grounds more sheltered and more Eden-like; it was full of trees, it bloomed with flowers: a very high wall shut it out from the court, on one side; on the other, a beech avenue screened it from the lawn. At the bottom was a sunk fence; its sole separation from lonely fields: a winding walk, bordered with laurels and terminating in a giant horse-chestnut, circled at the base by a seat, led down to the fence. Here one could wander unseen. While such honey-dew fell, such silence reigned, such gloaming gathered, I felt as if I could haunt such shade for ever; but in threading the flower and fruit parterres at the upper part of the enclosure, enticed there by the light the now rising moon cast on this more open quarter, my step is stayed — not by sound, not by sight, but once more by a warning fragrance.


94)
Outside the town a large gibbet had been erected, round which stood the soldiers and several thousands of people. The king and the queen sat on splendid thrones opposite to the judges and the whole council. The soldier already stood on the ladder; but as they were about to place the rope around his neck, he said that an innocent request was often granted to a poor criminal before he suffered death. He wished very much to smoke a pipe, as it would be the last pipe he should ever smoke in the world.

[*]


95)
Mr. Waife drew a long whiff, and took a more serene view of affairs. He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation, next to that which comes from Heaven. “What, softer than woman?” whispers the young reader. Young reader, woman teases as well as consoles. Woman makes half the sorrows which she boasts the privilege to soothe. Woman consoles us, it is true, while we are young and handsome! when we are old and ugly, woman snubs and scolds us. On the whole, then, woman in this scale, the weed in that, Jupiter, hang out thy balance, and weigh them both; and if thou give the preference to woman, all I can say is, the next time Juno ruffles thee, — O Jupiter, try the weed.

96)
Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.


97)
Approaching the blackness of the sentry tower, Karla took a couple of shorter steps and for a moment Smiley really thought he might change his mind and give himself up to the East Germans. Then he saw a cat’s tongue of flame as Karla lit a fresh cigarette. With a match or a lighter? he wondered. *To George from Ann with all my love.*


98)
The pleasures of a pipe. The tapping, the poking, the twisting, the cleaning, the stuffing, the lighting: those first cheekhollowing puffs, and the dramatic way the match flame is sucked deep into the tobacco, leaps high in release, and is sucked deep again. And then the mouth-filling perfume, the commanding clouds of smoke. Oddly, I find the facial expressions and mannerisms of other men who smoke pipes stagy, prissy, preening, and offensive. But ever since I, as an unheeded admonition to Esther some years ago, gave up cigarettes, the pipe has been my comfort, my steeplejack’s grab, my handhold on the precipitous cliff of life.


99)
Open the old cigar-box — let me consider anew —
Old friends, and who is Maggie that I should abandon *you*?

A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;
And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a Smoke.


100)
Used to be a hobo right smart. Back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitter cold. I had just a smidgin of tobacco, bout enough for one or two smokes. I was in one of them old slatsided cars and I’d been up and down in it like a dog tryin to find some place where the wind wouldnt blow. Directly I scrunched up in a corner and rolled me a smoke and lit it and thowed the match down. Well, they was some sort of stuff in the floor about like tinder and it caught fire. I jumped up and stomped on it and it aint done nothin but burn faster. Wasnt two minutes the whole car was afire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue looking and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees going by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I’m goin to tell you you’ll think peculiar but it’s the god’s truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I’ll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.

>>24864634
20 is of course Infinite Jest
>>24864673
82... "Uncle Toby" makes me think Tristram Shandy? Also it does read like Sterne
84 is Catch-22 (although I forget who this is referring to - Cathcart?)

>>24864661
>>24864751
Another one: "dry-breeched" makes me think 70 must be The Sot-Weed Factor

>>24864626
5 is lewis carrol alice in wonderland
>>24864628
is 8 defoe robinson crusoe? reads like it
>>24864639
29 is lorna doone blackmore
>>24864644
is 44 ts eliot?
>>24864650
i'll guess that 52 is fenimore cooper one of his leatherstocking tales idk which one
>>24864680
100 is mccarthy

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1) I know this is Oscar Wilde, even though I don't remember which work.
3) The Count of Monte Cristo
18) Edgar Allan Poe based on the name drop.
39) The Emperor of Ice Cream
62) Ahab towards the end of Moby Dick, I believe.
74) Gandalf (in The Hobbit?)
91) I want to say this is Sherlock Holmes.

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>>24864751
3/3 to get things started:—


>20 is of course Infinite Jest
Correct.

>82... "Uncle Toby" makes me think Tristram Shandy? Also it does read like Sterne
Does and is. It's the ridiculous war games they play where they set up a gadget to use their pipes to fire several cannons at once but then get distracted by smoking and forget to fight the battle at all.

>84 is Catch-22
Right.
>(although I forget who this is referring to - Cathcart?)
Also right:

. . . He had no doubts at all that someone as debonair and intellectual as General Peckem approved of his smoking with a cigarette holder, even though the two were in each other’s presence rather seldom, which in a way was very lucky, Colonel Cathcart recognized with relief, since General Peckem might not have approved of his cigarette holder at all. When such misgivings assailed Colonel Cathcart, he choked back a sob and wanted to throw the damned thing away, but he was restrained by his unswerving conviction that the cigarette holder never failed to embellish his masculine, martial physique with a high gloss of sophisticated heroism that illuminated him to dazzling advantage among all the other full colonels in the American Army with whom he was in competition. Although how could he be sure?

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>>24864758

>Another one: "dry-breeched" makes me think 70 must be The Sot-Weed Factor
Right. I would have thought the ship being called "Poseidon" would be more likely to jog people's memories, so you did it the hard way, but the answer is what matters.

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>>24864780
Basically all good here, although a couple of gaps that need filling:—


>5 is lewis carrol alice in wonderland
Of course. The caterpillar is surprisingly rude, even by the standards of Wonderland. But it does help her out so maybe it has a kind heart underneath the brusque exterior. I think it was supposed to be a portrait of some academic L.C. knew at Oxford.

>is 8 defoe robinson crusoe? reads like it
Sure is. R.C. spends a lot of effort making himself a pipe a bit later on.

>29 is lorna doone blackmore
RIght. John Ridd encountering these new-fangled cigarette things. He's a solid traditional clay pipe man himself of course.

>is 44 ts eliot?
It is, but I think we need the title of the poem, for reasons which will become obvious.

>i'll guess that 52 is fenimore cooper one of his leatherstocking tales idk which one
No-one should be expected to tell one JFC book from another. It's The Last Of The Mohicans.

>100 is mccarthy
Correct, but people who like the passage will surely want to know which book it’s from, so they can go and enjoy the whole thing for themselves.

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>>24864796
All good here:—


>1) I know this is Oscar Wilde, even though I don't remember which work.
Importance of Being Earnest. Lady Bracknell interrogating a potential future son-in-law.

>3) The Count of Monte Cristo
Right.

>18) Edgar Allan Poe based on the name drop.
Yes the name does help. It’s the beginning of The Purloined Letter.

>39) The Emperor of Ice Cream
Right, Wallace Stevens.

>62) Ahab towards the end of Moby Dick, I believe.
Correct. The chapter called "The Pipe". He philosophizes a bit then throws the pipe in the sea. See where philosophy gets you.

>74) Gandalf (in The Hobbit?)
Correct. At Beorn’s house.

>91) I want to say this is Sherlock Holmes.
Right. The Red-Headed League.

>Ducky Duck
err . . . what lol

>>24864966
>>Ducky Duck
>err . . . what lol
A restaurant I saw in Shinjuku back in 2018. No idea how it is or whether it's still there, but the name was too good to pass by (and clearly came in handy today).

>>24864634
18) That's Poe. Would guess either Rue Morgue or Purloined Letter, probably the first.
>>24864647
47) Barth, Sotweed? Edit: if that's 70, then Pynchon, Mason & Dixon?
>>24864673
82) Sterne, Tristram Shandy
>>24864680
96) Guessing St Vincent Millay

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>>24865038

>18) That's Poe. Would guess either Rue Morgue or Purloined Letter, probably the first.
It's the latter (someone already got EAP).

>47) Barth, Sotweed?
No, because —
>Edit: if that's 70,
Right
>then Pynchon, Mason & Dixon?
Correct.

>82) Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Right, although you're not the first.

>96) Guessing St Vincent Millay
Right and you are. Name of the poem is just the first line. Not sure she was all that pleasant a person. Half her stuff seems to be saying, basically, “Yes, I slept with you but I wouldn't want to know you socially”.

>>24864657
60 is L’etranger, Camus

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>>24865283
>60 is L’etranger, Camus
Right. Raymond asks M later whether he should have hit the policeman back but M sticks to his nihilist code and doesn't care one way or the other lol.

>>24864632
14 Ayn Rand, from Atlas shrugged. One of the few things I remember from that garbage book.

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>>24865429
>14 Ayn Rand, from Atlas shrugged.
Correct.

>One of the few things I remember from that garbage book.
It's not very good I must admit.

>>24864626
>5)
Caterpillar from Wonderland by Carroll
>>24864636
>23)
Sounds like Sherlock Holmes
>>24864639
>29)
Is this Peter Pan?
>>24864657
>57)
Just a hunch but Naked Lunch
>>24864661
>67)
Guessing this is Pynchon doing his boomer humor banana jokes
>>24864668
>74)
Gandolf

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>>24865901

>5)
>Caterpillar from Wonderland by Carroll
Correct, although you’re not the first.

>23)
>Sounds like Sherlock Holmes
Nope. SH has been found; he’s #91. There are quite a few other detective story writers in the author list.

>29)
>Is this Peter Pan?
Nope. This one has been ID’d as Lorna Doone.

>57)
>Just a hunch but Naked Lunch
No WSB in the author list. This one isn't really a famous passage but can perhaps be worked out logically given the authors you have to play with.

>67)
>Guessing this is Pynchon doing his boomer humor banana jokes
Lots of bananas at the start of Gravity’s Rainbow but this isn't from there. Mason & Dixon is #47 and no author is repeated.

>74)
>Gandolf
Correct, from The Hobbit (although again someone else got in there already).

>>24864661
68 is Faulkner?

>>24864634
>17)
Kind of reads like PKD with his mix of traditional and scientific words
>>24864636
>22)
1984 brand cigarettes?

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>>24866974

>68 is Faulkner?
It is. I guess that's worth a C. A. G. on its own, but if someone else can name the book, he’ll deserve one too.

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>>24867000

>17)
>Kind of reads like PKD with his mix of traditional and scientific words
Maybe it does, kind of, but it isn't him. A tricky one, as it’s short and fairly nondescript.

>22)
>1984 brand cigarettes?
Right, George Orwell. This one is sort of paired with #84 (already ID’d).

>>24864628
6 is Michel Houellebecq's serotonin right?

>>24864619
I can't trust AI for gathering quotes anymore. I tried to get a Shakespeare list of quotes with a blade theme and several of them were hallucinated nonsense.

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>>24867400
>6 is Michel Houellebecq's serotonin right?
Correct.

>>24867414
People trust AI too much for sure. It can be good but it can also be insane. You can get quite a lot of sense out of it if you prompt it intelligently but you have to double-check everything it offers.

Another point is that if you're searching for something quite like a very common thing but not exactly it¸ the common thing really acts like a black hole and pulls your search into it. Like imagine if there were some character called Harry in a book and he collected pottery, and you're trying to find him. Your day will go something like this:


Character called Harry, collects pottery

YOU MEAN HARRY POTTER, THE FAMOUS ICONIC CHARACTER IN THE SERIES OF CHILDREN'S BOOKS BY —

No. Not J. K. Rowling. Harry but an adult. And he collects pottery. His surname is not Potter.

HARRY POTTER IS A WIZARD IN A FAMOUS SERIES OF —

No. Listen to me you piece of shit. I don't want you to tell me anything about Harry Potter. Got that? Now. It's a book, probably from the 19th Century, with a character called Harry, who collects pottery.

NO, J. K. ROWLING DID NOT WRITE 19 HARRY POTTER BOOKS. SHE WROTE SEVEN. THEY ARE:

etc, etc


You can get round this but it's a fine art.

Bumping this effort thread

The one about the Andrew Gill cigs is from Dr. Bloodmoney
uhhhh
>>24864668
75
Which I didn't think was very good, probably my least favorite Dick. It has some interesting ideas but it's all over the place

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>>24869183

>The one about the Andrew Gill cigs is from Dr. Bloodmoney
>75
Correct.

>Which I didn't think was very good, probably my least favorite Dick.
It’s not very good overall but it has some good bits. This passage is quintessential PKD I think, because even though in theory he writes vaguely dystopian stuff he actually has a strong faith in the everyday goodness of the average person. There's a letter or something (maybe an essay?) where he talks about Robert A. Heinlein. Once when PKD was at a pretty low ebb financially and emotionally Heinlein wrote him an encouraging letter and gave him a new typewriter. He said, ‘RAH is about as far away from me politically as it’s possible to be but he still did this, and this is what I love about people and what I think matters’.

>It has some interesting ideas but it's all over the place
Yes it’s three or four quite separate novellas put in a food processor for a few seconds.

Bump.