Resisting Lady Nicotine

I am one of those weird nuts, who succesfully resisted the temptation to smoke through my teen years and college, only to succumb to it after I got out of Grad school. I guess one reason I resisted smoking was the suspicion that I had the addiction gene. It ran in the family. But smoking had a kind of fascination to it. As Ayn Rand describes it in Atlas Shrugged:

"I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind--and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression."

Ayn Rand's books had a tremendous impact on me, changing me from a left leaning teen to right of center adult. But one of the bad side-effects of her books had been to reduce my resistance to smoking. Also the camaderie that comes with sharing a cigarette, finally made me take up smoking. For the first few years I thought that I could quit anytime I wanted to. But soon realized that I could not. For the last eight years I have tried quitting many times, so I have a lot of practice. My attempts have lasted from all of ten minutes to a maximum of 48 hours. But invariably they have failed as soon as I took that one puff. No matter how much I convinced myself that this one cigarette would keep me going for another day, I relapsed to my regular pattern withing a few hours of that one puff. As I enter the second half of my life, I am making yet another attempt. Right now it has been three days since my last cigarette. It is very difficult and the cravings come in waves. From all my readings, these cravings can last for upto two weeks. Can I be strong enough?????