addiction
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul.—
Final Harvest (Boston, MA: Back Bay Books, 1964), 124.
After a day of giving up cigarettes I have decided what the hell, and am back on the old routine. I found that my smokeless yesterday didn’t bother me at all. It just seemed, merely, silly to deny myself that pleasure. I think it is really the adult substitute for thumbsucking.
July 1954 letter to Avis DeVoto in As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 183.
I wish you knew me before I was like this.
“New York is Killing Me,” by Alex Wilkinson, The New Yorker, August 9, 2010, 26–32.