Billiard Quotes & Sayings

Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen. — Richard P. Feynman

He had come to us only three years earlier, but had already won general sympathy, mainly because he "knew how to bring society together." His house was never without guests, and it seemed he would have been unable to live without them. He had to have guests to dinner every day, even if only two, even if only one, but without guests he would not sit down to eat. He gave formal dinners, too, under all sorts of pretexts, sometimes even the most unexpected. The food he served, though not refined, was abundant, the cabbage pies were excellent, and the wines made up in quantity for what they lacked in quality. In the front room stood a billiard table, surrounded by quite decent furnishings; that is, there were even paintings of English racehorses in black frames on the walls, which, as everyone knows, constitute a necessary adornment of any billiard room in a bachelor's house. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare of perfection, the still, unshakeable dream in the midst of frenzied activity, the random shot on the white billiard table of logic, I shall know neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall be there always in absolute silence to receive and to restore. — Henry Miller

My unworldliness, even at 21, was abnormal. Not only had I never smoked tobacco nor touched alcohol of any description, but I had never yet set foot inside a theatre, or gone to a race course I had never seen, nor held a billiard cue, nor touched a card. — Algernon Blackwood

Under the sad end-of-days spell of the smoky dusk and the waning year, of the moon and its ostentatious superiority to the trashy, petty claptrap of his sublunar existence, why does he even hesitate? The Kamizakis are your enemies whether you do or not, so you might as well do it. Yes, yes, if you can still do something, you must do it - that is the golden rule of sublunar existence, whether you are a worm cut in two or a man with a prostate like a billiard ball. If you can still do something, then you must do it! Anything living can figure that out. — Philip Roth

An officer put me in my place from the first moment.

I was standing by the billiard-table and in my ignorance blocking up the way, and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and without a word--without a warning or explanation--moved me from where I was standing to another spot and passed by as though he had not noticed me. I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Like billiard balls colliding our courses were altered. — Linda Collison

To: Christian Grey
Dear Completely & Utterly Smitten
I love waking up to you, too. But I love being in bed with you and in elevators and on pianos and billiard tables and boats and desks and showers and bathtubs and strange wooden crosses with shackels and four-poster beds with red satin sheets and boathouses and childhood bedrooms. — E.L. James

The billiard table is better than the doctor. — Mark Twain

Tis evident that all reasonings concerning matter of fact are founded on the relation of cause and effect, and that we can never infer the existence of one object from another, unless they be connected together, either mediately or immediately ... Here is a billiard ball lying on the table, and another ball moving toward it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball which was formerly at rest now acquires a motion. This is as perfect an instance of the relation of cause and effect as any which we know, either by sensation or reflection. — David Hume

Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls. — Gregory Bateson

If we're open to it, God can use even the smallest thing to change our lives ... to change us. It might be a laughing child, car brakes that need fixing, a sale on pot roast, a cloudless sky, a trip to the woods to cut down a Christmas tree, a school teacher, a Dunhill Billiard pipe ... or even a pair of shoes.
Some people will never believe. They may feel that such things are too trivial, too simple, or too insignificant to forever change a life. But I believe.
And I always will. — Donna VanLiere

The most trifling actions that affect a man's credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or at nine at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at the billiard-table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day. — Benjamin Franklin

Free people have a serious problem with place, being in a place, using up a place, deciding which new place to rotate to. Americans ricochet around the United States like billiard balls. — Walker Percy

There, he said. You see? You see how this is bad for one's billiard game? This thinking? The French have come into my house to mutilate my billiard game. No evil is beyond them. — Cormac McCarthy

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements. — Ernest Hemingway,

The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table, ... the collection is so tantalizingly incomplete, and the specimens themselves often so fragmented and inconclusive, that more can be said about what is missing than about what is present ... but ever since Darwin's work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man. — John Reader

By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other line so many hard and round billiard balls — Eric R. Wolf

Not every collision, not every punctilious trajectory by which billiard-ball complexes arrive at their calculable meeting places lead to reaction ... Men (and women) are not as different from molecules as they think. — Roald Hoffmann

There was something aggressively masculine about Toloose ... perhaps it was the look in his eye. Or the way he was holding his billiard cue. It was amazing the way a man in an embroidered coat could take on the air of a dockworker. — Eloisa James

At 24, my head was as shiny as a cue ball on a billiard table. I naturally thought this meant curtains. Actually, I found it helped. When I was too young to play real character parts, they mistook me for older because of the bald noggin. I got juicy roles right from the start. — Frank Cady

I imagine Einstein had a full sensational experience when he formulated his Theory of Relativity. He might have envisioned (inner) the sun and its weight in space as a billiard ball resting on a sheet. While he looked (outer) down at his notes, he might have remembered (inner) a past conversation with his good friend, the mathematician Marcel Grossmann, about mathematics and gravity. He might have felt (outer) tightness in his gut as he waited for an eclipse to take place, which would prove his theory right or wrong. — Sarah Wood Vallely

This was what was keeping me awake at night,' Walter said. 'This fragmentation. Because it's the same problem everywhere. It's like the internet, or cable TV- there's never any center, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. We can never sit down and have any kind of sustained conversation, it's all just cheap trash and shitty development. All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things are dying off. Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli. — Jonathan Franzen

Nice work," I said, alluding to her nails. "Maura, at The Hair Palace, does them. She's a genius with nails, and she'll bikini wax you till you're bald as a billiard ball. — Janet Evanovich

I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother's, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player's arm movement. — Milan Kundera

It was more wonderful than making love with a negro boxer on Mr Singer's billiard table. — Sebastian Faulks

Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table. Sufficiently complex systems have greater richness. Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways. — Stephen Jay Gould

He was full of ironical admiration of his childishness and innocence in letting a wandering and characterless and scandalous American load him up with deceptions of so transparent a character that they ought not to have deceived the housecat. On the other hand, he was remorselessly severe upon me for beguiling him, by studied and discreditable artifice, into bragging and boasting about his poor game in the presence of a professional expert disguised in lies and frauds, who could empty more balls in billiard pockets in an hour than he could empty into a basket in a day. — Mark Twain

You don't want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading. — Dorothy Parker

Pyscho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again. — Isaac Asimov

I'm all for past influences; the question is whether they are deterministic. Freud and the behaviorists argue that what we are at any given moment is billiard balls whose past determines our future course. That doesn't take into account that we are forever generating internal representations of positive futures and choosing among them. — Martin Seligman

But he always licked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman. — C.S. Lewis

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. — Ernest Hemingway,

Just as Emme neared the main staircase, as she could see the intricate carving of the banisters, a noise from behind her made her thundering heart skip. She froze mid stride and peered over her shoulder at the growing triangle of light emerging from the doorway of the billiard room. Tension coiled in her stomach, and her breath seized in her lungs. Someone was coming, and her wits fled her entirely. — Chasity Bowlin

It happened overnight - the evolution of an atomic identity towards a manifestation of life. There it was, polymers shrinking, disintegrating like Phenol without its Benzene. It was simply there, haphazard and hazardous as a series of exploding celluloid billiard balls. And there it was, until the sudden surge. And there was silence. — Dew Platt

As I stood there absorbing Hammett's novel, the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual poker game was being played. — Ross Macdonald

There are so many images pushed at women and so many ideas of what you're supposed to be. I think there's too much of this superwoman, this woman with a bottom like two billiard balls. There's no real celebration of just being a person. — Helen Fielding

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

it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built "The Breakers" he damned himself. — Joan Didion

He thought of nothing. Some thoughts or fragments of thoughts, some images without order or coherence floated before his mind--faces of people he had seen in his childhood or met somewhere once, whom he would never have recalled, the belfry of the church at V., the billiard table in a restaurant and some officers playing billiards, the smell of cigars in some underground tobacco shop, a tavern room, a back staircase quite dark, all sloppy with dirty water and strewn with egg-shells, and the Sunday bells floating in from somewhere.... The images followed one another, whirling like a hurricane. Some of them he liked and tried to clutch at, but they faded and all the while there was an oppression within him, but it was not overwhelming, sometimes it was even pleasant.... The slight shivering still persisted, but that too was an almost pleasant sensation. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

How horrid all this is!" said he. "Such weather makes every thing and every body disgusting. Dulness is as much produced within doors as without, by rain. It makes one detest all one's acquaintance. What the devil does Sir John mean by not having a billiard room in his house? How few people know what comfort is! Sir John is as stupid as the weather. — Jane Austen

On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness
The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.
The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is Ferric Oxide, known as rust.
The grizzly bear, whose potent hug,
Was feared by all, is now a rug.
Great Caesar's bust is on the shelf,
And I don't feel so well myself. — Arthur Guiterman

Subject: Sundown
Date: June 14 2011 09:35
To: Christian Grey
Dear Completely & Utterly Smitten
I love waking up with you, too. But I love being in bed with you and in elevators and on pianos and billiard tables and boats and desks and showers and bathtubs and strange wooden crosses with shackles and four poster beds with red satin sheets and boathouses and childhood bedrooms.
Yours
Sex Mad and Insatiable xx — E.L. James

After some cogitation, it is difficult not to agree with Herman Bondi (1919 - 2005), who in his book 'Relativity and Common Sense' says:
... The surprising thing, surely, is that molecules in a gas behave so much as billiard balls, not that electrons behave so little like billiard balls. — Felix Alba-Juez

If you don't stop feeling and start instructing, I'm going to rip out your eyes and replace them with these billiard balls. — Sarah J. Maas

As a kid, I was school swot, but I used to hang around the billiard halls, learning that Geordie sense of humour, mixing with low-lifes. They were the sort who'd pick your pocket and then say 'Here you are lad, here's tuppence, get yourself some chips'. I was a good rugby player, a good runner, so I fitted in at Cambridge quite easily. — Sid Waddell

Strictures, reproaches, and intemperate speeches from the Senator of Louisiana are really the wailings of an apostle of despair; he has lost control of himself, he is trying to play billiards with elliptical billiard balls and a spiral cue. — Huey Long

THE FINEST STORY IN THE WORLD" "Or ever the knightly years were gone With the old world to the grave, I was a king in Babylon And you were a Christian slave," - W.E. Henley. His name was Charlie Mears; he was the only son of his mother who was a widow, and he lived in the north of London, coming into the City every day to work in a bank. He was twenty years old and suffered from aspirations. I met him in a public billiard-saloon where the marker called him by his given name, and he called the marker "Bullseyes." Charlie explained, a little nervously, that he had only come to the place to look on, and since looking on at games of skill is not a cheap amusement for the young, I suggested that Charlie should go back to his mother. — Rudyard Kipling

A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls. — Terry Pratchett

Hume emphasized that the expectation of one thing following another does not lie in the things themselves, but in our mind. And expectation, as we have seen, is associated with habit. Going back to the child again, it would not have stared in amazement if when one billiard ball struck the other, both had remained perfectly motionless. When we speak of the 'laws of nature' or of 'cause and effect,' we are actually speaking of what we expect, rather than what is 'reasonable.' The laws of nature are neither reasonable nor unreasonable, they simply are. The expectation that the white billiard ball will move when it is struck by the black billiard ball is therefore not innate. We are not born with a set of expectations as to what the world is like or how things in the world behave. The world is like it is, and it's something we get to know — Jostein Gaarder

The young bloods of the South; sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard players and sportsmen, men who never did any work and never will. War suits them.. They are splendid riders, first rate shots and utterly reckless. These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace. — William Tecumseh Sherman

Fortunately, it doesn't seem to have made a lot of difference to my audience that I'm as bald as a billiard ball! — James Taylor

Loser"
"Father directed choir. When it paused on a Sunday,
he liked to loiter out morning with the girls;
then back to our cottage, dinner cold on the table,
Mother locked in bed devouring tabloid.
You should see him, white fringe about his ears,
bald head more biased than a billiard ball
he never left a party. Mother left by herself
I threw myself from her car and broke my leg ...
Years later, he said, 'How jolly of you to have jumped.'
He forgot me, mother replaced his name, I miss him.
When I am unhappy, I try to squeeze the hour
an hour or half-hour smaller than it is;
orphaned, I wake at midnight and pray for day
the lovely ladies get me through the day — Robert Lowell

I'd stopped waving to passengers in cars by then- I'd grown suspicious of people and all the complications of interior lives- so I sat and watched and rode and thought, and as soon as the bus doors opened, we all rolled out the doorand split apart like billiard balls. — Aimee Bender

The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects. — James Gleick

1. Institutions shape politics. The rules and standard operating procedures that make up institutions leave their imprint on political outcomes by structuring political behavior. Outcomes are not simply reducible to the billiard-ball interaction of individuals nor to the intersection of broad social forces. Institutions influence outcomes because they shape actors' identities, power, and strategies. 2. Institutions are shaped by history. Whatever other factors may affect their form, institutions have inertia and "robustness." They therefore embody historical trajectories and turning points. History matters because it is "path dependent": what comes first (even if it was in some sense "accidental") conditions what comes later. Individuals may "choose" their institutions, but they do not choose them under circumstances of their own making, and their choices in turn influence the rules within which their successors choose. — Robert D. Putnam