Opium Quotes

“Ô, Wanderess, Wanderess
When did you feel your
most euphoric kiss?
Was I the source
of your greatest bliss?”
― Roman Payne

“I like the posture, but not the yoga.
I like the inebriated morning, but not the opium. I like the flower but not the garden, the moment but not the dream. Quiet, my love. Be still. I am sleeping.”
― Roman Payne

“Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.
Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.”
― Roman Payne, Crepuscule

“I am burning myself up and will always do so.”
― Jean Cocteau

“The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.”
― Jean Cocteau

“Infidelity is an opium of unfaithfulness.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“Here's your first problem," he said, pointing at a sentence. "'Religion is the opium of the people.' Well, I don't know about people, but I think you'll find that the opium of pirates is actual opium.”
― Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists

“I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay”
― Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

“How about this? Hong Kong had been appropriated by British drug pushers in the 1840s. We wanted Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices. The Chinese didn't want our clothes, tools, or salted herring, and who can blame them? They had no demand. Our solution was to make a demand, by getting large sections of the populace addicted to opium, a drug which the Chinese government had outlawed. When the Chinese understandably objected to this arrangement, we kicked the fuck out of them, set up a puppet government in Peking that hung signs on parks saying NO DOGS OR CHINESE, and occupied this corner of their country as an import base. Fucking godawful behavior, when you think about it. And we accuse them of xenophobia. It would be like the Colombians invading Washington in the early twenty-first century and forcing the White House to legalize heroin. And saying, "Don't worry, we'll show ourselves out, and take Florida while we're at it, okay? Thanks very much.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“Opium: that terrible truth serum. Dark secrets guarded for a lifetime can be divulged with carefree folly after a sip of the black smoke.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“Nice work in their, Herondale, setting the place on fire," Gabriel observed. "Good thing we were there to clean up after you, or the whole plan would have gone down in flames, along with the shreds of your reputation."
"Are you implying that shreds of my reputation remain intact?" Will demanded with mock horror. "Clearly I have been doing somethin wrong. Or no doing something wrong, as the case may be." He banged on the side of the carriage. "Thomas!" We must away from here at once to the nearest brothel! I seek scandal and low companionship."
Thomas snorted and muttered somethin that sounded like "bosh", which Will ignored.
Gabriel's face darkened. "Is there anything that isn't a joke to you?"
Nothing that comes to mind."
"You know," Gabriel said, "there was a time I thought we could be friends, Will"
"There was a time I thought I was a ferret," Will said, "but it turned out to be the opium haze. Did you know it had that effect? Becausen I didn't.”
― Cassandra Clare, The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel

“There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.”
― André Malraux

“Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood - the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body.”
― Jean Cocteau

“My love", she whispered, so low she sounded to Jacques as if she were speaking from the bottom of an abyss, "now we shall belong to each other in a strange country that you do not know. It is the country of madmen but not the country of brutes. I am taking away your vulgar senses and giving you others more refined.”
― Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus

“The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“Opium is the perfect drug for people who want to remain articulate while being completely trivial.”
― Tony Kushner, A Bright Room Called Day

“That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Engleby

“The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight. That is why a poet, the revolutionary of the soul, limits himself to the about-turns of the mind. ”
― Jean Cocteau

“Reading Marguerite Young's 1,200-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was like slipping into a luxurious opium dream.”
― Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600

“According to Chesterton, tea-drinking’ is ‘pagan’, while beer-drinking is ‘Christian’, and coffee is ‘the puritan’s opium’.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“Foreign opium imported into China was chiefly produced in British India and shipped solely from British ports.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“Opium for tea—a formula which not only explains the successes of English imperialism in the Far East, but which thoroughly typified Europe's relationship to the Third World.”
― Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise

“For my own part, without breach of truth or modesty, I may affirm, that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature: and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my school-boy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man, it is no less true, that I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal, and have, at length, accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any other man - have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me. Such a self-conquest may reasonably be set off in counterbalance to any kind of degree of self-indulgence.”
― Thomas de Quincey

“Poppypap's a passport out”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“A compleat suppression of every species of stimulating indulgence, if attainable at all, must be a work of peculiar difficulty, since it has to encounter not only the force of habit, but propensities in human nature. In every age & nation, some exhilarating or exciting substance seems to have been sought for, as a relief from the languor of idleness, or the fatigues of labor. In the rudest state of Society, whether in hot or cold climates, a passion for ardent spirits is in a manner universal. In the progress of refinement, beverages less intoxicating, but still of an exhilarating quality, have been more or less common. And where all these sources of excitement have been unknown or been totally prohibited by a religious faith, substitutes have been found in opium, in the nut of the betel, the root of the Ginseng, or the leaf of the Tobo. plant.”
― James Madison

“Opium ain't got nothing on the promise of tomorrow turning up better than today.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Opium! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and pain! I had heard of it as I had of manna or of ambrosia, but no further. How unmeaning a sound was it at that time: what solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart! What heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances!”
― Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater

“Papa, a skilled physician, knew just what to give me. First, a shot of paregoric, a powerful tincture of opium, followed with a shot or two of gin. I haven't experienced a menstrual cramp yet that could survive this onslaught.”
― Lorena Cassady, Her Perilous Journey

“For unknown reasons, rare depressed patients even today will respond to no medicine except opiates, and a few researchers into depression have become newly interested in these substances. Fifty years ago, most patients who felt better on opium probably valued
it for its ability to ameliorate scattered symptoms, such as sleeplessness, anxiety, and a general sense of malaise. Perhaps for mistaken reasons, Kuhn took the occasional success of opium to set the standard
in the search for antidepressants. The hallmark of opium was that it restored energy in the depressed without being inherently energizing.

Kuhn set our "to find a drug acting in some specific manner against melancholy that is better than opium"- that is, a nonstimulating antidepressant.”
― Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac