Life's Pleasures Quote by Russell Hoban

Hoban’s line lands like a confession dressed up as a dare: if life doesn’t come with damage, it doesn’t quite count. The first sentence is almost banal in its addict logic - “I scarcely feel” - a phrase that makes numbness sound polite, manageable. Then he flips it into something brutally theatrical: living becomes inseparable from self-erasure. The jolt is in that double use of “living,” repeated like a test you keep failing. He’s not arguing smoking is good; he’s showing how an appetite can hijack the very definition of being alive.

The specific intent reads less like advocacy than self-diagnosis. Hoban pinpoints the perverse bargain at the heart of many compulsions: the thing that animates you is also the thing that is eating you. The subtext is existential, not merely chemical. Smoking stands in for any ritual that turns sensation into proof of existence. Without the burn, the body feels unreal; with it, the body feels doomed - and doom becomes a form of meaning.

Context matters: Hoban’s fiction often navigates fractured consciousness, ruined worlds, and the stubborn, sometimes grotesque ways people make significance out of scraps. Here, the scrap is a cigarette and the significance is a warped clarity: modern life can feel so abstract, so anesthetized, that self-harm starts masquerading as authenticity. The line’s bleak wit is that it refuses to romanticize the habit while admitting why the romance is so hard to quit.