"Absinthe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perfumed with so strong a reek of kirsch and absinthe as took Servien's breath away. The room was long and narrow, while against the walls varnished barrels with copper taps were ranged in a long-drawn perspective that was lost in the thick haze of tobacco-smoke hanging in the air under the gas-jets. At little tables of painted deal a number of men ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... however, one came to the conclusion that, bad as it was, opium-smoking had certainly more peaceful and less disgusting effects upon those unfortunates addicted to it than whiskey or absinthe, or votka drunkenness, ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... or with the absinthe or ver- mouth of the last musical comedy. The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything. Analysts with their problems, and teachers with their systems, are soon as old-fashioned as the pharmacopœia of Galen, — look at Ibsen ...
— The Tinker's Wedding • J. M. Synge
... absinthium) is celebrated for its intensely bitter, tonic, and stimulating qualities, which have caused it to be used in various medicinal preparations, and also in the making of liqueurs, as wormwood wine and creme d'absinthe.] ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... (very often), cheese (often), honey, sugar, salt, eggs, caviar, sulphur, apples (especially their odor), strawberries, mulberries, cinnamon, mace, capers, pepper, onions, mustard, beetroot, rice, mint, absinthe, roses (many pages are devoted to this antipathy), lilies, elder flowers, musk (which sometimes caused vomiting), amber, coffee, opiates, olive oil, vinegar, cats, frogs, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... have had so much confidence in me, and I hate to tell you that it was all misplaced. I have no doubt that I should not be doing it now but that I have drunken absinthe enough to give me the emotional point of view, which I shall regret to-morrow. I do not mean that I am drunk. I can think clearly and write clearly, but my ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the district attorney, as his colleague drew back out of sight once more. "You cannot remember the saloon in which you drank. That's possible enough; but perhaps you can remember what they gave you. Was it whiskey, rum, absinthe, or what?" ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... passively. When she returned Druce was pacing the room wild with impatience. His greenbacks and a bottle of absinthe lay on the table. ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... l'eprouve bien qu'elle est tondue cette pauvre brebis!... je me promene dans le jardin, je vois mes rosiers qui poussent bien; a qui offrirai-je les roses?... Eh bien! je ne voudrais pas que cette goutte d'absinthe cessat, car pour cela il faudrait l'oublier. L'oublier! Ah Dieu! Je suis comme les enfans d'Israel qui disaient: Super flumina Babylonis ... Sion. Mais ajoutons tout de suite: Si oblitus fuero hit, Jerusalem, oblivioni detur dextera mea." In another letter, June 8, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... proportions; reluctantly turned down the Boulevard Victor Hugo, past the Lycee and the Bourse, made the circuit of the mighty, double-arched oval of the Arena, and then retraced his steps. As he expected, M. Bocardon had left the bureau. It was the hour of absinthe. The porter named M. Bocardon's habitual cafe. There, in a morose corner of the terrace, Aristide found the huge man gloomily contemplating an absurdly small glass of the bitters known as Dubonnet. Aristide raised his hat, asked permission to ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... chair or in th' inside pocket iv th' coat, I say: 'No, ma'am, I live in gr-reat luxury surrounded be all that money can buy an' manny things that it can't or won't. There ar-re Turkish rugs on th' flure an' chandyleers hang fr'm th' ceilins. There I set at night dhrinkin' absinthe, sherry wine, port wine, champagne, beer, whisky, rum, claret, kimmel, weiss beer, cream de mint, curaso, an' binidictine, occas'nally takin' a dhraw at an opeem pipe an' r-readin' a Fr-rinch novel. ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... instance, there's Fournier-Fontaine, who had stores at Saint-Roch! do you know how much he failed for? Eight hundred thousand francs! And Gomer, the packer opposite to him—another Republican, that one—he smashed the tongs on his wife's head, and he drank so much absinthe that he is going to be put into a private asylum. That's the way with the whole of them—the Republicans! A Republic at twenty-five percent. Ah! yes! ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... Omelette Siberienne, Souffle Palmyre, Poires Alaska, most of them standard dishes of the usual cuisine Francaise, though the Omelette Siberienne was invented to please a British diplomat who preferred a soupcon of absinthe to either rum or Kuemmel with his omelette. And this is a typical menu drawn up by M. Anjema, a menu which reads as though it ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... add that Eldred's avowal had not shocked or repelled her as much as he had feared. For, among Michael's promiscuous intimates in Paris, Vienna, Rome, she had seen and heard more than Lenox was likely to guess of that enslavement to drugs and absinthe to which the artist's temperament seems peculiarly prone; though she was far from realising in detail the full horror and degradation involved. She merely felt certain that—heredity or no—Eldred was, by the nature of him, incapable of travelling far down that awful road; that ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... she tossed down the last half of her absinthe and twitched her flower-crowned head. "A kingdom must have a king, ma mere; and Dieu! but he is handsome, this Monsieur Gaston Merode! And if he carries out his part of the work to-night he will be worthy ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... that last bourne whither all evil-doers wander—Englishmen and dogs alone are seen abroad between nine and one. But in the soothing cool of the soft tropical evening, gay-lit boulevards, a magnificent State-subsidized opera-house, alfresco cafes where dawdle the domino-playing absinthe drinkers, the fierce-moustached gendarmes, and innumerable features typically and picturesquely French, induced me easily to believe myself back in the bewildering whirl of the Boulevard des Capucines or des Italiennes. Whether the narrow streets of the native city are clean ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... Printemps, and found his father sitting before it on the usual uncomfortable little chair before the usual white-topped table. He saw that his father's face wore the same expression as Dorothy's had worn before he had insisted on coming to her aid. Then he saw, with something of a shock, that a glass of absinthe stood on the table. Things must, indeed, be in a bad way if his father drank absinthe at half-past ten ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... Colloden is the same bully fellow; he is disconsolate, now, because he is beginning to take on flesh." Whereat both laughed. "Danridge is back from the North Cape, via Paris, with a new drink he calls The Spasmodic—it's made of gin, whiskey, brandy, and absinthe, all in a pint of sarsaparilla. He says it's great—I've not sampled it, but judging from those who have he is drawing it mild.... Betty Whitridge and Nancy Wellesly have organized a Sinners Class, prerequisites for membership in which are that you play ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... of 1848 there had been little intoxication in Paris; but in the twenty-two years that followed, the French had learned to drink absinthe and to frequent such places as "L'Assommoir." All accounts speak of the drunkenness in France ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... both were brought out to have their hands and feet and heads cut off in the Beit-el-Mal, in the presence of the dancing-girls and the populace. In the appointed place, when Seti saw how the bimbashi wept— for he had been to Paris and had no Arab blood in him; how he wrung his hands—for had not absinthe weakened his nerves in the cafes of St. Michel?—when Seti saw that he was no Arab and was afraid to die, then he told the truth to Selamlik Pasha. He even boldly offered to tell the pasha where half his own ill-gotten gains were hid, if he would let the bimbashi go. Now, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... You think it quite unnatural. Let us see. The actors are, it seems, the usual three: Husband, and wife, and lover. She—but fie! In England we'll not hear of it. Edmond, The lover, her devout chagrin doth share; Blanc-mange and absinthe are his penitent fare, Till his pale aspect makes her over-fond: So, to preclude fresh sin, he tries rosbif. Meantime the husband is no more abused: Auguste forgives her ere the tear is used. Then hangeth all on one tremendous IF:- IF ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... doctor's words. By degrees, however, Lynde warmed to life again; his gloom slipped off and was lost in the restless tides of life which surged about him. It was the hour when Paris sits at small green tables in front of the cafes and sips its absinthe or cassis; when the boulevards are thronged, and the rich equipages come and go. There was not a cloud in the tender blue sky against which the reddish obelisk of Luxor looked like a column of jet; the fountains were playing ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... forth its scum. Uncanny beings lurk at the corners. Wild with cognac and absinthe, the unruly mob commits every wanton act which unbridled wickedness can suggest. Good men are powerless, and women exposed to every insult. Public trade is suspended. Robbery and official pillage increase. The creatures of a day give way quickly to each other. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... morning, and read them all through again, from beginning to end, and between four and five o'clock he went for a walk on the boulevards, to get a little fresh air, as he used to say, and then came back to the seat which had been reserved for him, and asked for his absinthe. He used to talk to the regular customers, whose acquaintance he had made. They discussed the news of the day, and political events, and that carried him on till dinner-time, and he spent the evening like ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... fallow for want of training—and then my suffering is acute. When success—business or social or athletic or literary or artistic—comes to the untrained man under thirty-five, it comes pitifully near being his ruin. The adulation of the world is more intoxicating and more deadly than to drink absinthe out of a stein; more insidious than opium; more fatal than poison. It unsettles the steadiest brain and feeds the too-ravenous Ego with a food which at first he deemed nectar and ambrosia, but which he soon comes to feel is the staff of life, and ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... said, he was a valuable addition to our mess. One day he took me to a neighbouring village and introduced me to a fat comfortable-looking Maire, who spread his hands on his capacious knees and invited us to try a cooling nip of absinthe. After which he produced from a small choice store a bottle of fifty-year-old brandy, and made the town major take it away in token of a friendship that began in ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... of poisons.' Compared with other alcoholic beverages it has the greatest toxicity of all. There are laws against the stuff in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. It isn't the alcohol alone, although there is from fifty to eighty per cent. in it, that makes it so deadly. It is the absinthe, the oil of wormwood, whose bitterness has passed into a proverb. The active principle absinthin is a narcotic poison. The stuff creates a habit most insidious and difficult to break, a longing more exacting than hunger. It is almost as ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... proclivities, men who had had a share in the blazing terrors of the Commune, and who, in some cases, had paid the price in years of imprisonment under the tropical sun of Cayenne. In all their wanderings they had carried the spirit of revolution with them and spouted death to despots over their glasses of absinthe in cellar cafes. William H. Rideing, in an article which was published in "Scribner's Magazine" for November, 1879, described these men as he had found them in the Taverne Alsacienne in Greene Street: "gathered around the tables absorbed in piquet, ecarte, or vingt-et-un ... most ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... broad top currents of jealousy are the secret unmeasured tendencies of enmity or rivalry of ancient jealousy. To explain one man's vote we must remember that So-and-so threw a glass of absinthe in his face ten years ago in a Paris restaurant; that another was kicked in Soho; that another got work over the head of ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... morning we tubbed in the water of the river that floated Moses, and that has been bathed in and drunk since by such a number of people we know, or have read about. Sea and Nile are meeting in blue, and green, and brownish stripes, blending to a general absinthe colour as we get closer to the flat delta; little level rows of cloud throw purple shadows across the crisp small waves, and over the horizon there's a flight of white ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... haste, zhay angazha Rigol-bouche itself!" Take me away from these furnished apartments and maisons dorees, from the Jockey Club and the Figaro, from close-shaven military heads and varnished barracks, from sergents-de-ville with Napoleonic beards, and from glasses of muddy absinthe, from gamblers playing dominoes at the cafes, and gamblers on the Bourse, from red ribbons in button-holes, from M. de Four, inventor of 'matrimonial specialities,' and the gratuitous consultations of Dr. Charles Albert, from liberal lectures and government pamphlets, ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... the grumbling element who claim that absinthe never hurt any one, and cite as example the painter Harpignies, who lived to be almost a hundred, having absorbed on the average of two a day until the ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... pretendue republique sacro-sainte, une, indivisible, democratique, sociale, athenienne, intransigeante, despotique, invisible quoique etant partout. On y communie sous differentes especes; le matin (matines) on 'tue le ver' avec le vin blanc,—il y a plus tard les vepres de l'absinthe, auxquelles on se ferait un crime ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... a previous Existence in which the Dripped Absinthe was a Breakfast and the Cigarette a Luncheon and Elphye was trotting in her Glads and he had a Swell Bet down on Tin Bucket Preferred. The whole Lay-Out seemed unreal and remote and entirely disconnected with ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... would scarcely go together," Jeanne remarked. "But after all I should think that absinthe and cigarettes are more destructive. I am dying for some tea. Let us go in and find ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... own house his wrath mounted to the cold and inflexible bitterness of arctic destruction, but his mind seemed to clarify into a preternatural alertness such as the absinthe-drinker fancies gives a razor edge to his thought functions. Like the keenness of absinthe it was hallucination. The tremendous thrill of a madness that had been cumulative through months and had finally reached the fulfillment ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... simple, and yet they are not offensive to the eye. I had them made from a picture by Albert Durer. But tell me, what will you take to drink? Will you have a glass of champagne, or a brandy and soda, or what do you say to an absinthe?" ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... benignant indeed, and Ste. Marie was quite overcome with pleasure and gratitude; it seemed to him such a very kindly act in the elder man. He produced things to smoke and drink, and Captain Stewart accepted a cigarette and mixed himself a rather stiff glass of absinthe—it was between ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... as "a Kathleen sort of person." At the annual dinner of the club, which took place in a private dining room at the "Clarry" (the Clarendon Hotel) in February, Forbes was called upon to respond to the toast "The Real Kathleen." His voice, tremulous with emotion and absinthe frappe, nearly failed him; but he managed to stammer a few phrases which, thought at the time to be extemporaneous, called forth loud applause; but it was found later that he had jotted them down on the tablecloth during the soup and fish courses. "Fellow Scorpers," he ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... town Jean-Marie was kept a fixture on the driving-seat, to guard the treasure; while the Doctor, with a singular, slightly tipsy airiness of manner, fluttered in and out of cafes, where he shook hands with garrison officers, and mixed an absinthe with the nicety of old experience; in and out of shops, from which he returned laden with costly fruits, real turtle, a magnificent piece of silk for his wife, a preposterous cane for himself, and a kepi of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... called him tough—to yourself. Not aloud, for he would have "soaked" you as quickly as he would have soaked his thumb in your coffee. He saved money and started a basement table d'hote in Eighth (or Ninth) Street. One afternoon Andre drank too much absinthe. He announced to his startled family that he was the Grand Llama of Thibet, therefore requiring an empty audience hall in which to be worshiped. He moved all the tables and chairs from the restaurant into the back yard, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... in a solution of nitrate or chlorate of potash. But, till then, they had not found any of these polypores or even any of the morels which could replace them. On this day, the engineer, seeing a plant belonging to the wormwood genus, the principal species of which are absinthe, balm-mint, tarragon, etc., gathered several tufts, and, presenting them ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... tall, empty glass in his hand, and Morrow asked for a beer. As he stood sipping it, he watched the bartender replenish the empty unwashed glass he had carried with a generous drink of doubtful looking absinthe and a squirt ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... glad to hear about the simpatico boarding- house. Yes indeed I would like to hear about the people in it. And you are reading history? That's good. I'm getting sick of Paris and some day I'm going to stop an absinthe on the boulevard and slap its face to show I'm a sturdy moving-picture Western Amurrican and then leap to saddle and pursue the bandit. I'm working like the devil but what's the use. That is I mean unless one is doing the job well, as ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... brazier, no fewer than six old soldiers of the First Republic, with their uniforms torn and worn threadbare. Evidently they were of the mauvais sujet class; their bleary eyes and limp jaws told plainly of a common love of absinthe; and their eyes had that haggard, worn look of slumbering ferocity which follows hard in the wake of drink. The other side stood as of old, with its shelves intact, save that they were cut to half their depth, and in each shelf of ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... just before breakfast after two or three nights of debauchery, and offer him a jug of absinthe with a horned toad in it for his pony and saddle, and you will get them. Even in his more sober and thoughtful moments you can swap a suit of red medicated flannels with him for ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... songs of music halls; and sometimes in the place of honor, a group of tenth-rate barnstormers, imported for the occasion, to civilize these rustics and give them a taste of refined pleasures. For drinks, liquors mixed with brandy or absinthe: in the whole thing neither originality nor picturesqueness. License, indeed, and clownishness, but not that abandon which ingenuous joy brings ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner |
