Life's Pleasures Quote by Leo Rosten

Rosten doesn’t romanticize language as a pretty art; he frames it as a chemical you ingest. Calling words a “drug” smuggles in a whole pharmacology: dosage, dependency, side effects, black markets, bad trips. The line works because it refuses the comforting idea that speech is merely expressive. It’s instrumental. Words don’t just describe reality; they alter mood, perception, behavior, even physiology. You can feel your pulse change when someone names you a failure or a hero.

The adverb “surely” is doing quiet persuasive labor. It’s not an argument so much as a nudge toward agreement, the rhetorical equivalent of leaning closer and lowering your voice. And “invented” is the sharpest barb: language becomes a human technology, not a divine gift. That matters coming from a 20th-century novelist who lived through propaganda’s golden age, when regimes and advertisers learned to spike mass consciousness with slogans, euphemisms, and repetition. In that context, the drug metaphor reads less like metaphor and more like a warning label.

There’s subtext, too, about pleasure. Drugs are dangerous, but they’re also alluring. Words can intoxicate: the rush of a love letter, the clean hit of a joke, the euphoric clarity of a political chant that makes complexity feel solvable. Rosten’s insight is that literacy isn’t immunity. The more fluent you are, the more routes there are into your bloodstream.