Life Is Like Smoke Quotes & Sayings

She wanted to say, I am made of smoke. My mind is smoke, my thoughts are smoke, I am all smoke and only smoke. This body is a garment I put on, which by my magic art I have made capable of functioning as a human body functions, it's so biologically perfect that it can conceive children and pop them out in threes, fours and fives. Yet I am not of this body and could, if I chose, inhabit another woman, or an antelope, or a gnat. Aristotle was wrong, for I have lived for aeons, and altered by body when I chose, like a garment of which I had grown tired. The mind and the body are two, she wanted to say, but she knew it would disappoint him to be disagreed with, so she held her tongue. — Salman Rushdie

I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear, it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despot's fall, has more or less nothing to do with 'courage'. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life. — Salman Rushdie

One of the cardinal features of the Buddha's teaching is that all life, however solid it may seem to be, and all things, however separate they may seem to be, are in a state of flux. That is to say that the world we live in doesn't consist so much of things or entities as it consists of process. Everything is in a constant state of flowing pattern. By way of illustration you might say that it's something like the flowing pattern you see when you look at smoke: a dancing, constantly changing arabesque of pattern; flowing, flowing, all the time. Or that the substance of life is something like water, which I can hold in my hand so long as I cup it gently, but if I clutch at the water, I immediately lose it. — Alan W. Watts

Weak and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil; then are they borne away, like smoke they vanish into air, and what they dream they know is but the little each hath stumbled on in wandering about the world; yet boast they all that they have learned the whole - vain fools! for what that is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by mind of man. Thou, then, since thou hast fallen to this place, shalt know no more than human wisdom may attain. — Empedocles

Happy? That doesn't feel solid enough, somehow. Like it's fleeting or transient, and whenever something crappy happens, it's gone in a puff of smoke. I'm in love with someone I want to spend my life getting to know. He makes me feel safe and trusted and strong and beautiful, and all the things that give me validation that who I am is someone worth knowing. I guess it feels more bliss than happiness. — April White

All the comics are sigils. "Sigil" as a word is out of date. All this magic stuff needs new terminology because it's not what people are being told it is at all. It's not all this wearying symbolic misdirection that's being dragged up from the Victorian Age, when no-one was allowed to talk plainly and everything was in coy poetic code. The world's at a crisis point and it's time to stop bullshitting around with Qabalah and Thelema and Chaos and Information and all the rest of the metaphoric smoke and mirrors designed to make the rubes think magicians are 'special' people with special powers. It's not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. "Life" plus "significance" = magic. — Grant Morrison

When we enter a new situation in life and are confronted by a new person, we bring with us the prejudices of the past and our previous experiences of people. These prejudices we project upon the new person. Indeed, getting to know a person is largely a matter of withdrawing projections; of dispelling the smoke screen of what we imagine he is like and replacing it with the reality of what he is actually like. — Karl Popper

My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps.'
'Sounds like a boring life.'
'I hope it lasts forever. — Don DeLillo

DYING IS NOT HOT
By Celia the Dark

Cool is no longer cool because cool is now hot,
and school isn't school if you are skipping.
Then the neighborhood is school and John,
the creepy dropout guy is teaching.

And it isn't cool because the cool kids stay in school,
where the other cool kids tell them them how hot they are
and they wouldn't want to miss a dance for cutting.

Kids who skip school were never cool or hot but
already dumped into the trashcan with leftover lunch pizza,
bruised into a locker, asking their parents for extra lunch money
so they can smoke and act like they never cared anyway.

And skipping school's not cool but it is school
because that's where they learn what the uncool learn
about life and dying. — Karen Finneyfrock

Is it life?" he answered, "I would rather be without it," he said, "for there is queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon. — Flann O'Brien

I'm his subject, and he is my High Lord - " "You are no one's subject." I went rigid at the flash of teeth, the smoke-like wings that flared out. "I will say this once - and only once," Rhysand purred, stalking to the map on the wall. "You can be a pawn, be someone's reward, and spend the rest of your immortal life bowing and scraping and pretending you're less than him, than Ianthe, than any of us. — Sarah J. Maas

Life is like an old-time rail journey
delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. — Jenkin Lloyd Jones

The smoke! The golden smoke!
His robe whipped upward, turning him until his face was directed downward into the abyss. With his gaze on the depths, he recognized a maelstrom of boiling rapids there, the mirror of his life-precipitous currents and plunges, all movement gathering up all substance. Leto's words wound through his mind on a path of golden smoke: "Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve." Moneo fell freely then in the ecstasy of awareness. The universe opened for him like clear glass, everything flowing in a no Time. — Frank Herbert

Don't you miss having a man? Don't you want to get married?"
He [Patrick Sonnier] is simple and direct. I'm simple and direct back.
I tell him that even as a young woman I didn't want to marry one man and have one family, I always wanted a wider arena for my love. But intimacy means a lot to me, I tell him. "I have close friends - men and women. I couldn't make it without intimacy."
"Yeah?" he says.
"Yeah," I say. "But there's a costly side to celibacy, too, a deep loneliness sometimes. There are moments, especially on Sunday afternoons, when I smell the smoke in the neighborhood from family barbecues, and feel like a fool not to have pursued a "normal" life. But, then, I've figured out that loneliness is part of everyone's life, part of being human - the private, solitary part of us that no one else can touch." (p. 127) — Helen Prejean

If in fact your time to be called before God, you typically won't know it. Sometimes you will, and these are the hardest of times: When the blood pours from your nose and down your throat, clogging it, causing you to spit and gag. You heave for breath in the smoke and dust. Your equipment seems to suffocate you. You wipe the salty sweat and grime from your eyes, only to realize that it is blood, either yours or that of the enemy. You would stand, but you can't move your legs. You grasp the open, gaping wounds in your body, trying not to pass out from the pain. You feel the anger thinking of the loved ones you will never see again, and losing your life infuriates your soul. You rage to get to your feet and grab for a weapon, any weapon. Regardless of your race, culture, or religion, you want to die standing, fighting like a warrior, an American, so others won't have to. For those looking for a definition, this is the price of freedom. — Rusty Bradley

Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored. Dying ... or busy with other assignments. Because dying, too, is one of our assignments in life. There as well: "To do what needs doing." Look inward. Don't let the true nature of anything elude you. Before long, all existing things will be transformed, to rise like smoke (assuming all things become one), or be dispersed in fragments ... to move from one unselfish act to another with God in mind. Only there, delight and stillness ... when jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep going back to it. — Marcus Aurelius

That goes for old wounds, too, you know. I really wish we'd had the chance to talk before this," he says, cracking the window so the smoke can escape. "There's a Longfellow quote I have stuck on my bulletin board at the church office- 'There is no grief like the grief that does not speak'- and it's true. I've found that keeping pain inside doesn't give it a chance to heal, but bringing it out into the light, holding it right there in your hands and trusting that you're strong enough to make it through, not hating the pain, not loving it, just seeing it for what it really is can change how you go on from there. Time alone doesn't heal emotional wounds, Sayre, and you don't want to live the rest of your life bottled up with anger and guilt and bitterness. That's how people self-destruct. — Laura Wiess

I am dirt
and all the nights that keep ending like this:
I return from the party, my life is smoke,
I fall asleep trying to seduce you — Camille Rankine

Nothing happened for a whole day. Then, in a little hollow on the edge of the brooding hill, a few grains of sand shifted and left a tiny hole.

Something emerged. Something invisible. Something joyful and selfish and marvellous. Something as intangible as an idea, which is exactly what it was. A wild idea.

It was old in a way not measurable by any calendar known to Man and what it had, right now, was memories and needs. It remembered life, in other times and other universes. It needed people.

It rose against the stars, changing shape, coiling like smoke.

There were lights on the horizon.

It liked lights.

It regarded them for a few seconds and then, like an invisible arrow, extended itself towards the city and sped away.

It liked action, too . . . — Terry Pratchett

Evening prayer
I spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair,
Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs,
My neck and gut both bent, while in the air
A weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.
Like steaming dung within an old dovecote
A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.
And then, when I have swallowed down my Dreams
In thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turn
To satisfy a need I can't ignore,
And like the Lord of Hyssop and of Myrrh
I piss into the skies, a soaring stream
That consecrates a patch of flowering fern. — Arthur Rimbaud

And as it quickly became clear, there were not very many survivors to find. Only fourteen people were pulled out of the rubble alive, all within the first twenty-four hours of the collapse. About 50,000 people had been working in the buildings that day. Two thousand and sixteen died. Also among the dead: 343 firefighters and 60 police officers who were in or near the buildings when they collapsed. In the months after the attacks, it was hard to imagine that life would ever go back to normal. It never will for many people, like my friend who lost her brother; like the hundreds of firefighters who have serious health problems caused by the toxic smoke and dust they breathed at Ground Zero; like the thousands who managed to escape that day, but who saw the horrors up close. Today, while the horrors of that day still linger, the city itself is more vibrant than ever. People have done their best to move forward. — Lauren Tarshis

Everything is interim. Everything is a path or a preparation for the next thing, and we never know what the next thing is. Life is like that, of course, twisty and surprising. But life with God is like that exponentially. We can dig in, make plans, write in stone, pretend we're not listening, but the voice of God has a way of being heard. It seeps in like smoke or vapor even when we've barred the door against any last-minute changes, and it moves us to different countries and different emotional territories and different ways of living. It keeps us moving and dancing and watching, and never lets us drop down into a life set on cruise control or a life ruled by remote control. Life with God is a dancing dream, full of flashes and last-minute exits and generally all the things we've said we'll never do. And with the surprises comes great hope. — Shauna Niequist

The spires of the town below shimmer green, the roofs steam, and smoke rises silver from the chimneys. Georg points downward. Like spiders they lurk there in their offices, their shops, their professions, each one of them ready to suck the other man dry. And then the rest hanging over each one of them - families, societies, authorities, laws, the State! One spider's web over another! True, one may call that life, if one likes, and a man may even pride himself on crawling about under it his forty years and more; but I learned at the Front that time is not the measure of life. Why should I climb down forty years? I have been putting all my money for years now on one card and the stake has always been life. I can't play now for halfpence, and small advances. — Erich Maria Remarque

All of Creation's a farce.
Man was born as a joke.
In his head his reason is buffeted
Like wind-blown smoke.
Life is a game.
Everyone ridicules everyone else.
But he who has the last laugh
Laughs longest. — William Shakespeare

What's so funny?" "You freak out when I disappear and reappear, but you expect me to stop time." She laughed, too. "But why can't you? You're a god." "Like I said, we have more responsibilities than freedoms. I doubt even Zeus could pull that one off." From high above, a streak of light flew from the sky and struck a boulder not twenty feet from where they lay, sending sparks and smoke and a loud crack in all directions in the echoing valley. The boulder was split in half and was as black as coal. "Holy crap!" Therese cried, falling against Than. "What was that?" "Oops. My apologies," he muttered, but it didn't sound like he was talking to her. "I made someone angry." "That scared me to death. Does that happen often?" "No. Never to me. But this is an exceptional time in my life. — Eva Pohler

Perhaps, what I seek now is a friend like I have never had before. Someone to share a smoke and my thoughts with. Someone who will see life with the same eyes as I do; experience the same lift of spirit when mine soars. Someone whose destiny is woven with mine even though we are bound by neither blood nor any other tie. — Anita Nair

She blew a stream of smoke up at the empty clotheslines. 'These silly dreams you have when you're young. I mean, what, Katie and Brendan Harris were going ot make a life in Las Vegas? How long would that little Eden have lasted? Maybe they'd be on their second trailer park, second kid, but it would have hit them sooner or later - life isn't happily ever after and golden sunsets and shit like that. It's work. The person you love is rarely worthy of how big your love is. Because no one is worthy of that and maybe no one deserves the burden of it, either. You'll be let down. You'll be disappointed and have your trust broken and have a lot of real sucky days. You lose more than you win. You hate the person you love as much as you love him. But, shit, you roll up your sleeves and work - at everything -because that's what growing older is. — Dennis Lehane

You can't run, you can't hide, and the idea that you have no control at all just gets into your head and it sticks there. In my time in the Navy, I was never so scared in my life. Bombs and smoke everywhere, fires on the deck. Meanwhile, the guns are booming and the noise is like nothing you've ever heard. Thunder times ten, maybe, but that doesn't describe it. In the big battles, Japanese Zeros strafed the deck continually, the shots ricocheting all over the place. — Nicholas Sparks

The moment she was cursed, I lost her. Once it wears off- soon- she will be embarrassed to remember things that she said, things she did, things like this. No matter how solid she feels in my arms, she is made of smoke. — Holly Black

I'm still going to enjoy my life off the pitch and I don't think that has interfered with my life on it. In still playing, my body does not allow me to do some of the stuff I did before. The reality is I can't do the two. But I will still go out for a meal and a glass of wine and smoke a cigarette if I feel like it. — Russell Latapy

See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural homestead ... It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,
and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia. — Henry David Thoreau

A kind of joyous hysteria moved into the room, everything flying before the wind, vehicles outside getting dented to hell, the crowd sweaty and the smells of aftershave, manure, clothes dried on the line, your money's worth of perfume, smoke, booze; the music subdued by the shout and babble through the bass hammer could be felt through the soles of the feet, shooting up the channels of legs to the body fork, center of everything. It is the kind of Saturday night that torches your life for a few hours, makes it seem like something is happening. — Annie Proulx

Life is like a lit cigarette. The past is ashes, the present is burning, and the future is up in smoke. Fast as a breath; inhale exhale. — Anthony Liccione

When you do drugs, you count like a chemist: The numbers are wild, the formulas are easy. Then, when you try to get clean, you start to count like a pharmacist: How many hours between doses? How much or how little do you need to maintain? Then, when you finally give it up completely, you count like Noah in his dinky, seafaring ark full of pairs of every animal in God's creation: You count days. You wait for the rain to stop, for the sky to clear, for life to ever seem normal again. And then eventually it does. Then you start to count how many cups of black coffee you need just to get through every day, how many cigarettes you smoke. You know the address of every Starbucks in a mile radius, which is easy because there so many, and you know the names of every restaurant where they allow you to smoke, which is easy because they are so few. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I wanted to say a certain thing to a certain man, a certain true thing that had crept into my head. I opened my head, at the place provided, and proceeded to pronounce the true thing that lay languishing there - that is, proceeded to propel that trueness, that felicitous trularity, from its place inside my head out into world life. The certain man stood waiting to receive it. His face reflected an eager accepting-ness. Everything was right. I propelled, using my mind, my mouth, all my muscles. I propelled. I propelled and propelled. I felt trularity inside my head moving slowly through the passage provided (stained like the caves of Lascaux with garlic, antihistamines, Berloiz, a history, a history) toward its debut on the world stage. Past my teeth, with their little brown sweaters knitted of gin and cigar smoke, toward its leap to critical scrutiny. Past my lips, with their tendency to flake away in cold weather - — Donald Barthelme

The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire. You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down. — Lemony Snicket

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast. — Cesare Pavese

The greats? Well, they all share that quality Napoleon most admired in his generals: luck. Be in Kabul when it falls. Be in Manhattan on 9/11. Be in Paris the night Diana's driver makes his fatal misjudgement." I flinch as the windows blast in, but, no, that's not now, that's ten days ago. "A journalist marries the news, Seymour. She's capricious, cruel, and jealous. She demands you follow her to wherever on Earth life is cheapest, where she'll stay a day or two, then jet off. You, your safety, your family are nothing," I say it like I'm blowing a smoke ring, "nothing, to her. — David Mitchell

Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved? ... But cold morning would return, with clouds billowing out of Lightning Gorge like giant smoke, the lake below still cerulean neutral, and empty space the same as ever. O gnashing teeth of earth, where would it all lead to but to prove that the proving itself was nil ... — Jack Kerouac

Love is like the fire;
its glow is devotion,
its flame is wisdom,
its smoke is attachment,
and its ashes detachment.
Flame rises from glow,
so it is with wisdom,
which rises from devotion.
When love's fire produces its flame
it illuminates the devotee's path in life like a torch,
and all darkness vanishes. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

The Bible says this life is really like a puff of smoke. I don't want to strive and stress and be anxious over a puff of smoke when I have eternity to look forward to. — Newsboys