Life's Pleasures Quote by Brendan Behan

Behan takes the most sacrosanct object in Irish public life and turns it, with a jailhouse shrug, into contraband and kindling. The line lands because it refuses the expected posture of reverence: the Bible is first “consolation,” then rolling paper. In a single pivot, he grants religion its psychological utility while exposing how quickly lofty meanings get repurposed when your world shrinks to an “old cell.”

The specificity does the heavy lifting. “Lovely thin paper” is an almost sensual compliment, the kind you’d give a lover’s letter, except it’s aimed at institutional scripture. That adjective “lovely” is doing double duty: it’s sincere appreciation of craft (Bible paper really is made to be thin) and a comedian’s knife twist, praising the material while hollowing out the message. The “bit of matress stuffing” completes the dark ingenuity: when you’re imprisoned, comfort gets shredded into fuel, and salvation becomes something you inhale.

Context matters. Behan, an Irish dramatist with IRA ties and prison time, wrote from inside a culture where Catholicism functioned as both refuge and social machinery. In that world, the Bible isn’t just a book; it’s a badge. By treating it as “as good a smoke as I ever tasted,” he stages a quiet revolt against moral authority, but not a grand atheist manifesto. The subtext is more brutal and more human: institutions offer comfort, yes, but deprivation teaches you to convert every symbol into survival. Even faith becomes a technology - and in the cell, the tech that matters is fire.