Vapors Quotes & Sayings

Even for those who dislike champagne, myself among them, there are two champagnes one can't refuse: Dom Perignon and the even superior Cristal, which is bottled in a natural-colored glass that displays its pale blaze, a chilled fire of such prickly dryness that, swallowed, seems not to have been swallowed at all, but instead to have turned to vapors on the tongue and burned there to one damp sweet ash. — Truman Capote

The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind - whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity: for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. — Joseph Campbell

If anyone had appeared in just a pair of boxer shorts or swimming trunks, the womenfolk would have had "an attack of the vapors" and the menfolk would have exploded in a rage at the indecency of it. What exactly "an attack of the vapors" was is unclear, because there is no such thing as womenfolk anymore, and there is certainly no such thing as an attack of the vapors. — Philip Ardagh

Such planetary alignments are thought to lead to local miasmas: concentrations of fetid air and noxious vapors. These miasmas are then blown on the wind and enter men's and women's bodies through the pores of their skin. once inside they disrupt the balance of the 'humours (the substances believed to control the body's functions), and people fall sick. — Ian Mortimer

In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his sense a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, his fame doubtful. In short, all that is body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors. — Marcus Aurelius

We see but dimly through the mists and vapors; Amid these earthly damps What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers May be heaven's distant lamps. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sombre thoughts and fancies often require a little real soil or substance to flourish in; they are the dark pine-trees which take root in, and frown over the rifts of the scathed and petrified heart, and are chiefly nourished by the rain of unavailing tears, and the vapors of fancy. — John Frederick Boyes

The received image of a writer is that of an unproductive sensitive who suffers from the vapors, is enslaved by his gonads, falls victim to romantic swoons and passes out at deadlines. — George V. Higgins

The child tends to be stripped of all social influences but those of the market place, all sense of place, function and class is weakened, the characteristics of region and clan, neighborhood or kindred are attenuated. The individual is denuded of everything but appetities, desires and tastes, wrenched from any context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process of mutilation; and once this has been achieved, we are offered the consolation of reconstituting the abbreviated humanity out of the things and the goods around us, and the fantasies and vapors which they emit. A culture becomes the main determinant upon morality, beliefs and purposes, usurping more and more territory that formerly belonged to parents, teachers, community, priests and politics alike. — Jeremy Seabrook

Already, I seemed to feel my intellect deteriorating, my heart petrifying, my soul contracting; and I
trembled lest my very moral perceptions should become deadened, my distinctions of right and wrong confounded, and all my better faculties be sunk, at last, beneath the baneful influence of such a mode of life. The gross vapors of earth were gathering around me, and closing in upon my inward heaven; and thus it was that Mr. Weston rose at length upon me, appearing like the morning star in my horizon, to save me from the fear of utter darkness; and I rejoiced that I now had a subject for contemplation that was above me, not beneath. — Anne Bronte

Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. — Tim O'Brien

I remember I was really into this British band, The Vapors, with that song "Turning Japanese." I thought that they were really next level genius cryptic weirdos. And then I realized when I got older they are just using a lot of British words, and I didn't know what they meant. But I thought, Oh, they are making up their own language. — Craig Finn

Inhaling fumes directly from burning foliage, either in a confined space such as a cave or a tent, or scooping up and breathing in the vapors from psychoactive plant materials scattered on a bowl full of hot coals, must be an extremely ancient practice. Herodotus's account from the fifth-century BCE, describing the use of small tents by the Scythians (a northwestern Iranian tribe) for inhaling the smoke of cannabis, is probably the most famous account that confirms the antiquity of the use of cannabis as a ritual intoxicant. — John Rush

And God knows we are sensitive to the suffering that has sometimes broken loose to come billowing forth from your appendages like the pungent vapors of whales - often it appears that in this life of experience and accommodation we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. But Sissy ... hold on! — Jack London

As the days go on toward July, the earth becomes dry and all the flowers begin to thirst for moisture. Then from the hillside, some warm, still evening, the sweet rain-song of the robin echoes clear, and next day we wake up to a dim morning; soft flecks of cloud bar the sun's way, fleecy vapors steal across the sky, the southwest wind blows lightly, rippling the water into little waves that murmur melodiously as they kiss the shore. — Celia Thaxter

Beneath the current of our existence and within it, there is another current flowing in the opposite direction. In this life we go from yesterday to tomorrow, but there we go from tomorrow to yesterday. The web of life is being woven and unraveled at the same time. And from time to time we get breaths and vapors and even mysterious murmurs from that other world, from that interior of our own world. The inner heart of history is a counter-history; it is a process which inverts the course of history. The subterranean river flows from the sea and back to its source. — Miguel De Unamuno

But a smell shivered him awake.
It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. Meaty and redolent of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive - so alive! And it was close.
The vapors invaded Nicholas' nostrils and his hair rose to their roots. His eyes were as heavy as manhole covers, but he opened them. Through the dying calm inside him snaked a tremble of fear.
The trees themselves seemed tense, waiting. The moonlight was a hard shell, sharp and ready to ready be struck and to ring like steel.
A shadow moved.
It poured like oil from between the tall trees and flowed across dark sandy dirt, lengthening into the middle of the ring. Trees seem to bend toward it, spellbound. A long, long shadow ... — Stephen M. Irwin

Going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for dinner. — Ray Bradbury

About eight days ago I discovered that sulfur in burning, far from losing weight, on the contrary, gains it; it is the same with phosphorus; this increase of weight arises from a prodigious quantity of air that is fixed during combustion and combines with the vapors. This discovery, which I have established by experiments, that I regard as decisive, has led me to think that what is observed in the combustion of sulfur and phosphorus may well take place in the case of all substances that gain in weight by combustion and calcination; and I am persuaded that the increase in weight of metallic calyxes is due to the same cause ... This discovery seems to me one of the most interesting that has been made since Stahl and since it is difficult not to disclose something inadvertently in conversation with friends that could lead to the truth I have thought it necessary to make the present deposit to the Secretary of the Academy to await the time I make my experiments public. — Antoine Lavoisier

A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
Someday I shall tell of your mysterious births:
A, black velvety corset of dazzling flies
Buzzing around cruel smells,
Gulfs of shadow; E, white innocence of vapors and of tents,
Spears of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of Queen Anne's lace;
I, purples, spitting blood, smile of beautiful lips
In anger or in drunken penitence;
U, waves, divine shudderings of green seas,
The calm of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of furrows
Which alchemy prints on wide, studious foreheads;
O, sublime Bugle full of strange piercing sound,
Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels;
- O the Omega, the violet ray of her Eyes! — Arthur Rimbaud

Seek to make life henceforth a consecrated thing; that so, when the sunset is nearing, with its murky vapors and lowering skies, the very clouds of sorrow may be fringed with golden light. Thus will the song in the house of your pilgrimage be always the truest harmony. It will be composed of no jarring, discordant notes; but with all its varied tones will form one sustained, life-long melody; dropped for a moment in death, only to be resumed with the angels, and blended with the everlasting cadences of your Father's house. — John Ross Macduff

What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more. — Herman Melville

Marshes that are stagnant and have no outlets either by rivers or ditches, like the Pomptine marshes, merely putrefy as they stand, emitting heavy, unhealthy vapors. A case of a town built in such a spot was Old Salpia in Apulia ... Year after year there was sickness, until finally the suffering inhabitants came with a public petition to Marcus Hostilius and got him to agree to seek and find them a proper place to which to remove their city. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

Why do you care what happens to her? I thought we humans were vapors to you, here today and gone tomorrow."
"Caspida is . . . different. She reminds me of someone, someone I'd give my life for if I could."
"The queen?" he asks. "The one who died?"
"Roshana. My dear Ro." My voice is soft as a ripple on the water. "She once ruled the Amulens, and Caspida is her descendant. She has Roshana's strength of spirit, and I cannot look at her without thinking of my old friend. If she were to come to harm on my account . . . I could not bear that through the centuries." I already carry a mountain of shame, a constant reminder of that day on Mount Tissia.
Aladdin lifts a hand and brushes the hair back from my face. "You truly are remarkable, Zahra of the Lamp. — Jessica Khoury

Zenia," he said, "I'm not good at it - tea and cakes. I have no patience with it."
She looked directly at him. "I suppose you would prefer to eat on the ground with your fingers?" Her dry remark seemed to take him aback. He looked at her with a faint frown. "Shall I sprinkle some sand on the butter," she asked, "to put you more at ease?"
He tilted up one corner of his mouth. "No." He lifted his cup, extending his little finger with an exaggerated delicacy. "I can play, if I must. How does your dear aunt do, Lady Winter? I hear she has the vapors once an hour. I have a receipt for a rhubarb plaster - most efficacious! Of course, if you prefer a more permanent cure, nothing can surpass a fatal dose of arsenic. — Laura Kinsale

Good and evil, and joy and pain, and I and you- colored vapors did they seem to me before creative eyes. The creator wished to look away from himself,- and so he created the world. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What ascends up in prayer descends to us again in blessings. It is like the rain which just now fell, and which had been drawn up from the ground in vapors to the clouds before it descended from them to the earth in that refreshing shower. — Hannah More

Down sank the great red sun, and in golden, glimmering vapors Veiled the light of his face, like the Prophet descending from Sinai. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come. — Herman Melville

In the sunlight, snow melts, crystals evaporate into a steam, into nothing. In the firelight, vapors dance and vanish. In the core of a volcano, fragile things burst and disappear. The girl, in the gunfire, in the heat, in the concussion, folded like a soft scarf, melted like a crystal figurine. What was left of her, ice, snowflake, smoke, blew away in the wind. The tiller seat was empty. — Ray Bradbury

Hell, covering all with its gloomy vapors, has cast shadows on even the holiest eyes. — Jean Racine

Well, if you insist. But, my dearest flower, how ghastly to consider that such a mustache must shadow the clean-shaven grandeur of my domicile.' Lord Akeldama was rumored to insist that all his drones go without the dreaded lip skirt. The vampire had once had the vapors upon encountering an unexpected mustache around a corner of his hallway. Muttonchops were permitted in moderation, and only because they were currently all the rage among the most fashionable of London's gentlemen-about-town. Even so, they must be as well tended as the topiary of Hampton Court. — Gail Carriger

And most of all, it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles - asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy. — Naomi Klein

Live loath'd and long,
Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites,
Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears,
You fools of fortune, trencher friends, time flies
Cap and knee slaves, vapors, and minute jacks. — William Shakespeare

Her mind blank, she pulled a sheet of paper toward herself, then folded over a vertical strip. Sliding her nail along the edge to weaken it, she tore off a thin strip. Then another. The smooth actions helped order her thoughts. "No, it is not appropriate, but it might be all right. Why do you think you must nickname me? Is it to belittle me or to create a bond between us?" "I'm not sure which is the right answer," he replied. "To be honest, at first I expected you to be selfish and spoiled." "Such compliments will give me the vapors." Smoothing her strips of paper, she began pleating them into a little spring. If her hands trembled a little, he would not notice. — Theresa Romain

Daphne didn't know much about the old woman, but apparently a young man had smiled at her on her twenty-first birthday and she'd gone straight to bed with an attack of the vapors and stayed there, still gently vaporizing, until she completely vaporized at the age of eighty-six, apparently because her body was fed up with having nothing to do. — Terry Pratchett

It flourished on the air softly in vapors of cobalt light, whispering and sighing. — Ray Bradbury

So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss, Which sucks two souls, and vapors both away. — John Donne

What do you mean fainted?
Took a dive, kissed the pavement. Swooned like a southern belle after her first kiss. Had a dreadful case of the vapors. — Ilona Andrews

In California, the state's huge dairy herd produces twenty-seven million tons of manure a year, the particulates and vapors from which have helped to make air quality in the argiculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley worse than it is Los Angeles. — Paul Roberts

The day before yesterday, men brought the Bible and medicine to the blacks, and received in exchange their intangible souls. Yesterday, they brought cheap jewelry and deadly firearms, and took away ivory and rubber - and human life. To-day, they came with weird cries and sleep-inducing vapors - and flew away with live and protesting gorillas. To-morrow? . . . Perhaps, they would remove the jungle itself. . . . — Bertram Gayton

Since, during storms, flames leap from the humid vapors and dark clouds emit deafening noises, is it surprising the lightning, when it strikes the ground, gives rise to truffles, which do not resemble plants? — Plutarch

The individual is denuded of everything but appetites, desires, and tastes, wrenched from any context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process of mutilation; and once this has been achieved, we are offered the consolation of reconstituting the abbreviated humanity out of the things and the goods around us, and the fantasies and vapors which they emit. — Jeremy Seabrook

Nature paints not; In oils, but frescoes the great dome of heaven; With sunsets, and the lovely forms of clouds; And flying vapors. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If dualism is true, then life after death is not only possible, but plausible. That's because our immaterial minds are distinct from our material bodies, and the mortal fate of our bodies in no way implies the death of our minds. Even more than this, the death of the body becomes a kind of emancipation for the mind, because during life our minds are inextricably bound to our bodies. Think of a vapor or gas that is sealed inside a bottle. Smash the bottle and you haven't smashed the vapor; you have released it. The fate of the vapor is not tied to the fate of the bottle as long as vapors and bottles are different kinds of stuff. Both Plato and Descartes advanced arguments along these lines for the immortality of the soul, — Anonymous

Do not acid vapors have the very properties of melancholia, whereas alcoholic vapors, always ready to burst into flame, suggest frenzy; and sulfurous vapors, agitated by a violent and continuous movement, indicate mania? — Michel Foucault

The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper. — Ray Bradbury

They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die. — Anthony Doerr

The three cardinal tenets of rum drinking in Newfoundland. The first of these is that as soon as a bottle is placed on a table it must be opened. This is done to "let the air get at it and carry off the black vapors." The second tenet is that a bottle, once opened, must never be restoppered, because of the belief that it will then go bad. No bottle of rum has ever gone bad in Newfoundland, but none has ever been restoppered, so there is no way of knowing whether this belief is reasonable. The final tenet is that an open bottle must be drunk as rapidly as possible "before all to-good goes out of it. — Farley Mowat

What exists is real; therefore it is tragic, since whatever lives must die. Only fantasy, the vapors rising from sheer nonsense, can now excite my laughter. — Jack Vance

A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. — Douglas Adams

Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility. — Mary McCarthy

Softly the evening came. The sun from the western horizon Like a magician extended his golden want o'er the landscape; Trinkling vapors arose; and sky and water and forest Seemed all on fire at the touch, and melted and mingled together. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Everyone had run to do her bidding. Soon only the three men
the three useless ones
had been left in the sitting room to fight terror and nausea and fits of the vapors.
The door opened. Three pale, terrified faces turned toward it.
-the three manly men waiting during a childbirth — Mary Balogh

Books are never harmless ... they either strengthen us or they weaken us in our faith. Some of them do this even as they entertain us, others as they teach us. In an invisible way their teaching penetrates into our hearts and souls, to continue its work inside, and we inhale the spirit of these books as healing or poisonous vapors. They can bring the greatest benefits and the greatest ruin, for from their ideas that they spread come the deeds of the future. — Peter Prange

With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's
Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower,
Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,
Where evil comes up softly like a flower.
Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,
Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;
But like an old sad faithful lecher, fain
To drink delight of that enormous trull
Whose hellish beauty makes me young again.
Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full,
Sodden with day, or, new appareled, stand
In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,
I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and
Hunted have pleasures of their own to give,
The vulgar herd can never understand. — Charles Baudelaire

There were other things too, something resembling soggy cotton balls, and something else, like clumps of tangled hair, and all of that inhabited the noxious grass, ate it, crawled in it, intoxicated by its vapors, gave birth, and died, turning into muck. It was all grass, if you stopped to think about it, all flesh was as grass and nothing more. Blind — Mariam Petrosyan

He tried his luck again, and things went so smoothly that with no more noise or disturbance than the last time, he found himself rid of the burden that had caused him so much grief. But since Don Quixote had a sense of smell as acute as his hearing, and Sancho was joined so closely to him, and the vapors rose up almost in a straight line, some unavoidably reached his nostrils, and as soon as they did he came to the assistance of his nostrils and squeezed them closed between two fingers, and in a somewhat nasal voice, he said: It seems to me, Sancho, that you are very frightened. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Aristotle's opinion ... that comets were nothing else than sublunary vapors or airy meteors ... prevailed so far amongst the Greeks, that this sublimest part of astronomy lay altogether neglected; since none could think it worthwhile to observe, and to give an account of the wandering and uncertain paths of vapours floating in the Ether. — Edmond Halley

Newspapers ... serve as chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smoke. — Thomas Jefferson

I stayed away from drugs, I never smoked a pipe. When I wanna get high, I smoke the mic. I never did white lines, I only write lines, and I ain't sniffin' nothing but the vapors from hype rhymes. — Kool Moe Dee

The fog wasn't simply the steamy vapors off the bay caught and penned in by hills, but a soft breath of anonymity that shrouded and cushioned the bashful traveler. — Maya Angelou

With no small interest, Captain Delano continued to watch her
a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, through which the far matin light from her cabin streamed equivocally enough; much like the sun
by this time hemisphered on the rim of the horizon, and, apparently, in company with the strange ship entering the harbor
which, wimpled by the same low, creeping clouds, showed not unlike a Lima intriquante's one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loop-hole of her dusk saya-y-manta. — Herman Melville

She wore tight corsets to give her a teeny waist - I helped her lace them up - but they had the effect of causing her to faint. Mom called it the vapors and said it was a sign of her high breeding and delicate nature. I thought it was a sign that the corset made it hard to breathe. — Jeannette Walls

Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living. The night is cold and delicate and full of angels Pounding down the living. The factories are all lit up, The chime goes unheard. We are together at last, though far apart. - from "The Ecclesiast" by John Ashbery — Philip Pullman

Henri was giggling now, barely able to contain himself. "So I'm to shovel coal into my shoes hoping no one notices, while smoke and steam - what of the vapor?"
"There's little more smoke than a cigar, and the steam would be barely visible by gas lamp. It vents out the back of your trousers, under the tail of your coat."
"Marvelous!" said Henri. "I use a similar port for my own vapors. I want to try them, immediately. — Christopher Moore

His rancor doesn't change the fact I had to close the breach no matter the cost." Brishen gazed at the human who once saved his life and called him friend. "You understand I wouldn't have altered anything had that been you instead of Megiddo?"

Serovek chuckled and batted away a demon with the back of his hand. 'I'd hope not. I didn't much relish the idea of being skewered, resurrected and thrown on a sham horse so I can chase demons all over the place. You ruining the entire plan because you had a fit of the vapors about sacrificing me wouldn't endear you to me. — Grace Draven

It's not for Zeus's daughter to be A prey to common fears, I never feel Chill fingered panic's touch. But the horrors Creeping out of Old Night's womb Since the first beginnings of all things, 8940 With shapes as many as the fiery vapors Billowing from a crater's fiery mouth, Make even heroes' hearts turn faint. When — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the season. A great chocolate-colored pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapors; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvelous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the black end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The black land slid by and he was going into the country among the hills. For the first time in a dozen years the stars were coming out above him, in great processions of wheeling fire. He saw a great juggernaut of stars form in the sky and threaten to roll over and crush him ... the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper. The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years. He listened to his heart slow. His thoughts stopped rushing with his blood. — Ray Bradbury

Steiner has here transformed the vaporous conceptions of his life, the vapors of what never was and never will be, from their aeriform state to a fine and ethereal substantiality. My Unwritten Books is a gathering of shades, an elegant and eloquent gathering of mind, feeling, and autumnal passion. ( ... ) And that is the lovely irony of this unique little book. None of these unwritten books should have been written. They are better here, as they are, untamed and errant phantoms of a brilliance whose emanations no one mortal lifetime could ever accommodate in full. — Nick Tosches

We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

I found myself face to face with a long line of people resembling extras off the set of Night of the Living Dead: shuffling along, pale and twitching, empty cups in hand
murderous. Miserable. No matter that the air was rich with vapors of fresh-ground beans and warm muffins; no matter that the soft piped-in Vivaldi poured over us like steamed milk. These angry zombies were rushing to work, and their eyes flashed fair warning: Don't mess with us. We haven't had our coffee. — Joan Frank

You are aware of only one unrest;
Oh, never learn to know the other!
Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And one is striving to forsake its brother.
Unto the world in grossly loving zest,
With clinging tendrils, one adheres;
The other rises forcibly in quest
Of rarefied ancestral spheres.
If there be spirits in the air
That hold their sway between the earth and sky,
Descend out of the golden vapors there
And sweep me into iridescent life.
Oh, came a magic cloak into my hands
To carry me to distant lands,
I should not trade it for the choicest gown,
Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There are other ideologies with which to expunge the last vapors of reasonableness from a society's discourse, but Islam is undoubtedly one of the best we've got. — Sam Harris

Ivanov's breath smelled of vodka and sewers, sour and heavy, like something rotting, reminiscent of empty houses near swamps, nightfall at four in the afternoon, vapors rising from the sickly grass and fogging the dark windows. A horror film, thought Ansky. Where everything has come to a halt, and it comes to a halt because it knows it's lost. — Roberto Bolano

Tis ever thus: indulgence spoils the base;
Raising up pride, and lawless turbulence,
Like noxious vapors from the fulsome marsh
When morning shines upon it. — Joanna Baillie

A good sherris-sack hath a twofold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. — William Shakespeare

I softly sink into the bath of sleep: With eyelids shut, I see around me close The mottled, violet vapors of the deep, That wraps me in repose. — J.G. Holland

The black asphalt wouls shimmer with vapors I had a theory about those vapors ... not released by the sun but by a huge onion buried under the city. This onion made us cry ... I thought about the giant onion, that remarkable bulb of sadness. — Gary Soto

Khaldoun believed that the great curse of civilization is not war or famine but humidity: "When the moisture, with its evil vapors ascends to the brain, the mind and body and the ability to think are dulled. The result is stupidity, carelessness and a general intemperance. — Eric Weiner

Breathe in ... inhale vapors from bright stars that shine,
Breathe out ... weed smoke retrace the skyline. — Mos Def

Bog-lights, vapors of mysticism, psychic Gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations - this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your book shelves.
Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget. — Jack London