Narcotic Quotes

“In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb.”
― Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

“Surety is a narcotic which masks the fact that you're dying. Losing it is a gift.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again: Diary of a Dark Lord

“I will not deny, however, that in the course of the journey, he sometimes stopped at the edge of a meadow, at the entrance to a forest, to gather some herb (always the same one, I believe): and he would then chew it with an absorbed look. He kept some of it with him, and ate it in the moments of greatest tension (and we had a number of them at the abbey!).”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose