Allen Carr · 224 pages
Rating: (5.9K votes)
“Wouldn’t that be an incredibly stupid thing to do? To say ‘I never want to smoke again’, then spend the rest of your life saying ‘I’d love a cigarette.’ That’s what smokers who use the Willpower Method do. No wonder they feel so miserable. They spend the rest of their lives desperately moping for something that they desperately hope they will never have.”
“The whole business of smoking is like forcing yourself to wear tight shoes just to get the pleasure of taking them off.”
“There are people who can make love standing on a hammock, but it is not the easiest way.”
“However, you cannot force smokers to stop, and although all smokers secretly want to, until they are ready to do so a pact just creates additional pressure, which increases their desire to smoke. This turns them into secret smokers, which further increases the feeling of dependency.”
“Responsibility becomes stressful only when you don’t feel strong enough to handle it.”
“The cigarette gets the credit for everything and the blame for nothing.”
“The main reason that smokers find it difficult to quit is that they believe that they are giving up a genuine pleasure or crutch. It is absolutely essential to understand that there is nothing to ‘give up’.”
“The moment you stop smoking, everything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on the fact that you’ve stopped smoking. Now when you have a mental block, instead of just getting on with it you start to say, ‘If only I could light up now, it would solve my problem.’ You then start to question your decision to quit smoking.”
“Eight hours after putting out a cigarette, you are 97% nicotine-free. After just three days of not smoking, you are 100% nicotine-free.”
“The moment you stop smoking, everything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on the fact that you’ve stopped smoking.”
“If you haven’t got your health you haven’t got anything’ but it’s true. I used to think that physical fitness fanatics were a pain. I used to claim that there was more to life than feeling fit: like booze and smokes.”
“Smokers do not smoke because they enjoy it. They do it because they are miserable without it.”
“Whenever you think about smoking you must see it as a lifetime’s chain of filth, disease, fear, misery and slavery.”
“Quite simply, the key to being a happy non-smoker is to remove the desire to smoke. With no desire to smoke, it takes no Willpower not to do so.”
“We think of stopping smoking as something that is very difficult to do. What do we need when we have something difficult to do? We need our little friend. So stopping smoking appears to be a double blow. Not only do we have a difficult task to perform, which is hard enough, but the crutch on which we normally rely on such occasions is no longer available.”
“To me this is the most tragic part of this whole business. How hard we worked to become hooked, and this is why it is difficult to stop teenagers. Because they are still learning to smoke, because they still find cigarettes distasteful, they believe they can stop whenever they want to. Why do they not learn from us?”
“The effect of the brainwashing is that we tend to think like the man who, having fallen off a 100-story building is heard to say as he passes the fiftieth floor, ‘So far, so good!”
“When I had tried to stop previously there were weeks of dark depression. There would be odd days when I was comparatively cheerful but the next day I would invariably sink back into the misery and depression. It was like clawing your way out of a slippery pit—you feel that you are nearing the top; you can see the sunshine—and then find yourself sliding back down again.”
“relaxation is like drinking bourbon to get sober.”
“I was in control of every area of my life except for smoking. The cigarette was deciding where I could go, what I could do, when I could do it and with whom.”
“Get it clear in your mind: CIGARETTES DO NOT FILL A VOID. THEY CREATE ONE! These bodies of ours are the most”
“To be a person of relative power and privilege viewing a person of less power and privilege is a political act. The gaze of the powerful is neither neutral nor benign; misrecognition hinders the ability of black people to act as citizens. Indeed, hooks asserts, challenging white people’s assumptions about what they see when they view black people is a critical step toward liberation and equality.21”
“But if a role model in her seventies isn't layered with contradictions - as we all come to be - then what good is she? Why bother to cut the silhouette of another's existence and place it against our own if it isn't as incongruous, ambiguous, inconsistent, and paradoxical as our own lives are?”
“A man does what must be done,' Karl said, trying to concentrate on his board-making.
"But you never complain."
'What good would complaining do? A job takes so many hours of work, complaining will not shorten those hours.”
“He raised his hand to brush a stray hair from her face. Instead of dropping his hand, he slid it behind her neck and drew her closer. His earthy pine scent enveloped her. When his lips touched hers, she lost any hope of control.”
“The way you respond to me. You’re poetry in motion.”
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