“A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

“If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?”

Katherine Paterson book Jacob Have I Loved

“Something in her eyes
Must be the smoke in my lungs.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

“Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.”

Ray Bradbury book The Halloween Tree

“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

“They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel (1967–2020) American author and journalist

“Other people have shrubbery in their gardens. You have a bottomless pit.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

“And the fifth angel blew his trumpet. And I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to the earth, and the key of the pit of the abyss was given him. And he opened the pit of the abyss, and smoke ascended out of the pit as the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun was darkened, also the air, by the smoke of the pit. And out of the smoke locusts came forth upon the earth; and authority was given them, the same authority as the scorpions of the earth have. And they were told to harm no vegetation of the earth nor any green thing nor any tree, but only those men who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads.”

John the Evangelist (10–98) author of the Gospel of John; traditionally identified with John the Apostle of Jesus, John of Patmos (author o…

“My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

“There was a young lady named Mae
Who smoked without stopping all day;
As pack followed pack,
Her lungs first turned black,
And eventually rotted away.”

Edward Gorey (1925–2000) American writer, artist, and illustrator