Time & Perspective Quote by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Colette’s line lands like a perfume bottle thrown across a drawing room: elegant, cutting, and aimed at a habit that pretends to be style. She doesn’t frame smoking as vice or illness but as something more socially incriminating: a ritualized permission slip for doing nothing. “Inject and excuse” is the tell. Smoking becomes an act of self-administration, a tiny needle of pause slipped into the bloodstream of the day, while also functioning as an alibi. The cigarette is both the dose and the story you tell yourself about why you deserve it.

The gendered address matters. In Colette’s era, the sight of women smoking carried a charge: modernity, sexual autonomy, a refusal of domestic choreography. By naming “male and female” together, she flattens that glamour and insists the mechanism is universal. Whatever freedom or sophistication the cigarette signals, it also standardizes a kind of sanctioned drift. Everyone gets to disappear for five minutes, repeatedly, and call it a necessity.

The subtext is less moralistic than diagnostic. Colette, a novelist of appetites and performance, spots how people curate their own delays. Smoking isn’t just an addiction; it’s a socially legible gesture that manufactures interiority on demand: a prop for contemplation, seduction, boredom, nerves. The brilliance is how she reframes “taking a break” as a habit of rehearsed withdrawal, a small daily abdication dressed up as attitude.