After the first death, there is no other...

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? / oil on canvas

Dylan Thomas

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

A farewell to smoking...

Yannis Stavrou, Change of Night Patrol, oil on canvas

July 30, the last day of smoking in Greece...
A farewell to the companion of our thoughts, imagination, melancholy - in nice & bad days...

Some quotes about smoking:

Smoke your pipe and be silent; there’s only wind and smoke in the world.

Irish Proverb

Tobacco, divine, rare super excellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all panaceas, potable gold and philosopher’s stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases.

Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Rudyard Kipling, The Betrothed

My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.

Winston Churchill

I promised myself that if ever I had some money that I would savor a cigar each day after lunch and dinner. This is the only resolution of my youth that I have kept, and the only realized ambition which has not brought disillusion.

Somerset Maugham

It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake.

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.

I make it a rule never to smoke while I' m sleeping.

Mark Twain