42 Quotes On Smoking And Life

In the intricate tapestry of life, certain habits and experiences often serve as poignant metaphors, and smoking is undoubtedly one of them. Whether it's the ephemeral pleasure of a cigarette or the heavier connotations of choices and mortality, smoking has inspired profound reflections from thinkers, writers, and everyday individuals alike. This collection of 42 quotes offers a diverse glimpse into the ways smoking interacts with our perception of life, illuminating insights from history, culture, and personal musings. Each quote serves as a window into the human condition, sparking contemplation and perhaps even a moment of introspection. Join us as we delve into these thought-provoking perspectives, where smoke curls around the essence of existence, and life reveals itself in unexpected wisps.

1. “Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.” - Brooke Shields

2. “Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness” - Italo Svevo

3. “He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation, next to that which comes from heaven.” - Edward Bulwer-Lytton

4. “Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't.” - David Sedaris

5. “Smoking I find the most ridiculous of all the varieties of human behavior and practically the only one that is entirely against nature. Can you imagine a cow or any animal taking a mouthful of smoldering straw then breathing in the smoke and blowing it out through its nostrils?” - Ian Fleming

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

7. “Hey, I stopped smoking cigarettes. Isn't that something? I'm on to cigars now. I'm on to a five-year plan. I eliminated cigarettes, then I go to cigars, then I go to pipes, then I go to chewing tobacco, then I'm on to that nicotine gum” - John Candy

8. “Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to 'show' it to me because as soon as I saw it my future would change by definition. This is why Werner Heisenberg's adaptation of the Hays Office—the so-called principle of uncertainty whereby the act of measuring something has the effect of altering the measurement—is of such importance. In my case the difference is often made by publicity. For example, and to boast of one of my few virtues, I used to derive pleasure from giving my time to bright young people who showed promise as writers and who asked for my help. Then some profile of me quoted someone who disclosed that I liked to do this. Then it became something widely said of me, whereupon it became almost impossible for me to go on doing it, because I started to receive far more requests than I could respond to, let alone satisfy. Perception modifies reality: when I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick.” - Christopher Hitchens

9. “Reading his autobiography many years later, I was astonished to find that Edward since boyhood had—not unlike Isaiah Berlin—often felt himself ungainly and ill-favored and awkward in bearing. He had always seemed to me quite the reverse: a touch dandyish perhaps but—as the saying goes—perfectly secure in his masculinity. On one occasion, after lunch in Georgetown, he took me with him to a renowned local tobacconist and asked to do something I had never witnessed before: 'try on' a pipe. In case you ever wish to do this, here is the form: a solemn assistant produces a plastic envelope and fits it over the amber or ivory mouthpiece. You then clamp your teeth down to feel if the 'fit' and weight are easy to your jaw. If not, then repeat with various stems until your browsing is complete. In those days I could have inhaled ten cigarettes and drunk three Tanqueray martinis in the time spent on such flaneur flippancy, but I admired the commitment to smoking nonetheless. Taking coffee with him once in a shopping mall in Stanford, I saw him suddenly register something over my shoulder. It was a ladies' dress shop. He excused himself and dashed in, to emerge soon after with some fashionable and costly looking bags. 'Mariam,' he said as if by way of explanation, 'has never worn anything that I have not bought for her.' On another occasion in Manhattan, after acting as a magnificent, encyclopedic guide around the gorgeous Andalusia (Al-Andalus) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, he was giving lunch to Carol and to me when she noticed that her purse had been lost or stolen. At once, he was at her service, not only suggesting shops in the vicinity where a replacement might be found, but also offering to be her guide and advisor until she had selected a suitable new sac à main. I could no more have proposed myself for such an expedition than suggested myself as a cosmonaut, so what this says about my own heterosexual confidence I leave to others.” - Christopher Hitchens

10. “As Alaska zipped through something obvious about linear equations, stoner/baller Hank Walsten said, "Wait, wait. I don't get it.""That's because you have eight functioning brain cells.""Studies show that Marijuana is better for your health than those cigarettes," Hank said. Alaska swallowed a mouthful of fries, took a drag on her cigarette, and blew a smoke at Hank. "I may die young," she said. "But at least I'll die smart. Now, back to tangents.” - John Green

11. “If I had felt then as I feel now, or as I felt a few years after I had married her, nothing could possibly have persuaded me to marry a woman who smoked. Dates, yes. Sexual adventures, yes. But to pin myself permanently inside closed quarters with a smoker? Never. Never. Never. Beauty wouldn't count, sweetness wouldn't count, suitability in every other respect wouldn't count.” - Isaac Asimov

12. “Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.” - Herman Melville

13. “Char bought a pack of clove cigarettes, claiming they tasted good, to which I ask why doesn't she just go suck on a clove so I don't have to inhale her perfumed second hand smoke?” - Julie Halpern

14. “Why do you have a cigarette lighter in your glove compartment?" her husband, Jack, asked her. "I'm bored with knitting. I've taken up arson” - Audrey Niffenegger

15. “A bitch always smokes." He looks back at Lucy. "A bitch is the opposite of a whore. A bitch doesn't need anybody. Or she wants people to think she doesn't need anybody. And she smokes to prove it.” - C. JoyBell C.

16. “Well, I'm not here to impinge on anybody else's lifestyle. If I'm in a place where I know I'm going to harm somebody's health or somebody asks me to please not smoke, I just go outside and smoke. But I do resent the way the nonsmoking mentality has been imposed on the smoking minority. Because, first of all, in a democracy, minorities do have rights. And, second, the whole pitch about smoking has gone from being a health issue to a moral issue, and when they reduce something to a moral issue, it has no place in any kind of legislation, as far as I'm concerned.” - Frank Zappa

17. “Are you still doing that crap?" I ask."You can't even do it properly," Eileen says."Just a matter of practice," Simone says."Wow! Practicing how to poison yourself and make your breath reek like the fart of a seagull!" Eileen cries.” - Randa Abdel-Fattah

18. “Personally, if I were trying to discourage people from smoking, my sign would be a little different. In fact, I might even go too far in the opposite direction. My sign would say something like, "Smoke if you wish. But if you do, be prepared for the following series of events: First, we will confiscate your cigarette and extinguish it somewhere on the surface of your skin. We will then run you nicotine-stained fingers through a paper shredder and throw them into the street, where wild dogs will swallow them and then regurgitate them into the sewers, so that infected rats can further soil them before they're flushed out to sea with the rest of the city's filth. After such time, we will sysematically seek out your friends and loved one and destroy their lives."Wouldn't you like to see a sign like that?” - George Carlin

19. “When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate.” - Jeffrey Bernard

20. “You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.” - William Saroyan

21. “He rarely smoked, but once in a while, like now, when his world had been shaken, his woman nearly killed in front of his eyes, and he’d watched a house consume a man and spit him out, he figured a drag or two were appropriate.” - Christine Feehan

22. “After some time he felt for his pipe. It was not broken, and that was something. Then he felt for his pouch, and there was some tobacco in it, and that was something more. Then he felt for matches and he could not find any at all, and that shattered his hopes completely.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

23. “Cigarettes are a classy way to commit suiside.” - Kurt Vonnegut

24. “Seth lay on a sofa. His large dirty work boots were defiantly planted on the sofa cushion, all his energy focused on smoking a cigarette, as if it were a job.” - Frederick Weisel

25. “...smoking is just a habit. 'Tolstoy', she said, mentioning someone I hadn't met, 'says that just as much pleasure can be got from twirling the fingers'. My impulse was to tell her Tolstoy was off his onion, but I choked down the heated words. For all I know, the man might be a bosom pal of hers and she might resent criticism of him, however justified.” - P. G. Wodehouse

26. “I quit smoking in December. I’m really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist’s life, and now people like Bloomberg have made animals out of smokers, and they think that if they stop smoking everyone will live forever.” - David Lynch

27. “Hugh returned from his trip, and days later I still sounded like a Red Chinese asking questions about the democratic hinterlands. "And you actually saw people smoking in restuarants? Really! And offices, too? Oh, tell me again about the ashtrays in the hospital waiting room, and don't leave anything out.” - David Sedaris

28. “What is this thing you call substance abuse? All I wanna do is forget and get loose.Drinking and smoking over and overWhat's so great about a life that's sober?There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.I'm tired of searching for words in the sky.All I wanna do is drink and die. Nothing is real. It's all a big lie. All I wanna do is drink and die. There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.” - Benjamin Alire Saenz

29. “I understand that smoking is vaguely inappropriate in certain situations. You know, like an orphanage, cancer ward, whatever.” - Greg Proops

30. “He grumbles incoherently, opens the window a fraction and continues to smoke away. It’s like every time Sidney Drake enters a new location he has to readjust the atmosphere, akin to one of those sci-fi shows where they oxygenate the planet, but for my dad it’s in a suffocating reverse. He replaces the clean wholesome air with a non-stop puff of toxic poison.” - Tom Conrad

31. “Not Really," he said then lit a cigarette and handed it to me. I inhaled. Coughed. Wheezed. Gasped for breath. Coughed again. Considered vomiting. Grabbed the swinging bench, head spinning, and threw the cigarette to the ground and stomped on it, convinced my Great Perhaps did not involve cigarettes.” - John Green

32. “Rather than you smoking a cigarette, the cigarette is really smoking you.” - Anthony Liccione

33. “We look up to see if it is day or night. If stars burn cool and moon does shine, we take to smoke divine and wine. If breath of sun does belch its heat, we boil coffee and prepare to eat.” - Roman Payne

34. “smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

35. “You all smoke to enjoy it, I smoke to die.” - John Green

36. “She only maintains that it is possible, under some circumstances, for a lady to murder her husband; but that a woman who wears ankle-strap shoes and smokes on the street corner, though she may be a joy to all who know her and have devoted her life to charity, could never qualify as a lady.” - Judith Martin

37. “He'd end up back in his room again, moodily smoking whatever he could get his hands on, the sole source of light in the room the faint radioactive glow coming from the commemorative chunk of Earth in its crystal cube, inscribed with the famous quote from the Administration. AT LEAST WE GOT THE TERRORISTS, it said.” - Michael Rubens

38. “Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.” - Augusten Burroughs

39. “You’ve been smoking again, haven’t you? Your eyes look like road maps and you’re in full bastard mode.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

40. “I'd be (...) lying there on my back with my clothes on and looking up at the ceiling and watching the cigarette smoke flow up slow and splash against the ceiling like the upside-down slow-motion moving picture of the ghost of a waterfall or like the pale uncertain spirit rising up out of your mouth on the last exhalation, the way the Egyptians figured it, to leave the horizontal tenement of clay in its ill-fitting pants and vest.” - Robert Penn Warren

41. “There is no such thing as 'just one last cigarette' – except the last cigarette that you've already had.” - H.M. Forester

42. “Smoking is suicide by instalments.” - H.M. Forester