sedaris

It's popular to believe that every smoker was brainwashed, sucked in by product placements and subliminal ads. This argument comes in handy when you want to assign blame, but it discounts the fact that smoking is often wonderful. For people like me, people who twitched and jerked and cried out in tiny voices, cigarettes were a godsend. Not only that, but they tasted good, especially the first one in the morning, and the seven or eight that immediately followed it. (247)

Sedaris, David. "The Smoking Section." When You Are Engulfed in Flames. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2008. 240-323.

sycamore

Jeremy asks if I've had any good sex. That's when I'm more dramatic: I feel like there was a time, a number of years ago, when I felt a sense of so much possibility in sex, in sluttiness — and now it seems like everyone's so compulsive about finding dissatisfaction, and it makes me so depressed that I stop thinking about sex. I don't really have a libido, either — except at random moments when I'm on the bus or walking down the street and unfortunately it's not those random moments that are scripted to lead to something. (114)

Sycamore, Mattilda Bernstein. So Many Ways to Sleep Badly. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2008.