Daily Inspiration Quote by Irwin Shaw

Sobriety, in Shaw's hands, isn't a moral upgrade; it's a negotiation with a mutinous physical self. "I've gone on the wagon" announces a clean, socially legible decision: the speaker has joined the respectable club of abstainers. Then the second clause kicks the legs out from under that tidy narrative. "My body doesn't believe it" treats addiction like a failed treaty, not a resolved conflict. The mind can swear off, perform willpower, even adopt the language of reform. The body, meanwhile, remains unconvinced - still conditioned, still craving, still remembering.

The line works because it drags the private reality of dependency into the realm of belief. Bodies don't literally "believe"; they habituate. By giving the body a skepticism usually reserved for intellect, Shaw captures the humiliating lag between intention and biology: the tremor, the restlessness, the insomnia that mocks self-control. It's also a sly comment on how recovery gets staged as a single decisive pivot point. One day you're drinking, the next day you're "on the wagon". Shaw punctures that myth with a punchline that lands like a confession.

Context matters: Shaw, a mid-century American novelist with a journalist's ear for vernacular, writes in the long shadow of Prohibition and its linguistic leftovers, when drinking carried both swagger and stigma. This sentence belongs to a world where men trade jokes to mask vulnerability. Humor becomes cover, but not escape: the wit is the only thing sober here.