Quotes & Sayings About Phlegm

Yeah, personally I hate my period and think it's annoying and gross, but it's not more gross than anything else that comes out of a human body. It's not more gross than feces, urine, pus, bile, vomit, or the grossest bodily fluid of them all - in my mother's professional opinion - phlegm. And yet we are not horrified every time we go to the bathroom. We do not stigmatize people with stomach flu. The active ingredient in period stigma is misogyny. This — Lindy West

The kind of people who spoke mostly Yiddish, which is a combination of German and phlegm. This is a language of coughing and spitting; until I was eleven, I wore a raincoat. — Billy Crystal

He lay in bed open-eyed in the dark. There were intestinal moans from his left side, where gas makes a hairpin turn at the splenic flexure. He felt a mass of phlegm wobbling in his throat but he didn't want to get out of bed to expel it, so he swallowed the whole nasty business, a slick syrupy glop. This was the texture of his life. If someone ever writes his true biography, it will be a chronicle of gas pains and skipped heartbeats, grinding teeth and dizzy spells and smothered breath, with detailed descriptions of Bill leaving his desk to walk to the bathroom and spit up mucus, and we see photographs of ellipsoid clots of cells, water, organic slimes, mineral salts and spotty nicotine. Or descriptions just as long and detailed of Bill staying where he is and swallowing. — Don DeLillo

German reminded her of an old man hacking up phlegm. — Sara Shepard

'Escargot' is French for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm'. — Dave Barry

Don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,' Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. 'There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about - a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'
'Pain?' Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife pounced upon the word victoriously. 'Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.'
'And who created the dangers?' Yossarian demanded ... 'Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us? — Joseph Heller

Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives. — James Alexander Thom

This is the part of the country that invokes terrible nostalgia, a morbid and phlegm-induced retrospective of parties, clubs, drugs, shows, people, and is the goiter of my Boston days. I wouldn't have a clue as to who I'd ever care to see in this town, though I've done time here. If it weren't for Daughters and company, I'd feel like a compete tourist in a ghostly, plot-less town...pulling hoods up and heads around, opposite directions, if I ever saw someone I thought I might have known. Young people feeling really cool in bathrooms, dancing to the same songs in the same clubs, with the same dropout students, artists, thugs, bullies, jocks, all game in the search for one's self and sex. — Wesley Eisold

Birth is a shadow. Courage, self-sustained, outlords succession's phlegm, and needs no ancestors. — Aaron Hill

My dad used to tell me that laughter was like a cough or a sneeze - the body's way of trying to expel something. But instead of some phlegm in your throat, or some dust up your nose, a laugh happened when something really true got into your brain. Something so true that your system just couldn't stand it. — J. Ross Clara

Mr. Heathcliff and his man climbed the cellar stairs with vexatious phlegm. — Emily Bronte

Shudder, in fact, is not quite the word for the feeling. Feeling is not quite the word for the feeling. How's bathing at knifepoint in the phlegm of the dead? Is that a feeling? — Sam Lipsyte

There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain? — Joseph Heller

ESAELP GNITTIPS ON
This mysterious decree would incite me to defy it and spit on the ground at once, but because the police were stationed two steps away in front of the Governor's Mansion, I'd just stare at it uneasily instead. Now I began to fear that spit would suddenly climb out of my throat and land on the ground without my even willing it. But as I knew, spitting was mostly a habit of grown-ups of the same stock as those brainless, weak-willed, insolent children who were always being punished by my teacher. Yes, we would sometimes see people spitting on the streets, or hawking up phlegm because they had no tissues, but this didn't happen often enough to merit a decree of this severity, even outside the Governor's Manson. Later on, when I read about the Chinese spitting pots and discovered how commonplace spitting was in other parts of the world, I asked myself why they'd gone to such lengths to discourage spitting in Istanbul, where it had never been popular. — Orhan Pamuk

You have wavered uncertainly between two systems, between drawing and coloring, between the painstaking phlegm, the stiff precision, of the old German masters, and the dazzling ardor, the happy fertility, of the Italian painters. — Honore De Balzac

People were made up of shit and piss and phlegm and bits and pieces of experience. — Sarah Hall

Still, I know how to use the little I have, my flat stomach and rather flatter chest, my slightly bowed, but strong and flexible legs. I produce plenty of phlegm. I have clever hands and a stare that could take the silvering off a mirror. Men flatter themselves they are original in admiring me. How confused they are when they find out they have competition. (There is no desperation like that of a lover who has decided to do you a favor, and finds himself waiting in line.) — Shelley Jackson

But in this Second Work if thou extract our Air and our Fire with the phlegm water, they will the more naturally and easily be drawn out of their infernal prison, and with less losse of their Spirits, than by the former way before described. — George Ripley

Once I managed to get to a sink, staring up out of it at my empty-stomached face was a collection of facial hair, discarded razor blades, plasters, snot and phlegm, all fused together into one stomach churning mass. I retched, but nothing came up. My eyes watered at the festering sight and my stomach was in knots as I ran my hand over the surface of the water. It was freezing cold. I flung the cruel liquid over my hair, then, as if straight from Oliver Twist, I asked one of the two screws that were standing over us like bouncers, 'Is there any toothpaste, sir? — Stephen Richards

What's the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said. — Cormac McCarthy

Embarrassment thickened in his throat like phlegm. — Ross Macdonald

Rose took my nose, I suppose," he repeated; the bubble of phlegm in his throat made a disgusting crackle. "And it really blows. — James Dashner

A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm. — Bill Bryson

The human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These are the things that make up its constitution and cause its pain and health. Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed. — Hippocrates

Josh Hutchins's battered old Pontiac gave a wheeze like an old man with phlegm in his lungs. — Robert McCammon

The body of man has in itself blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile; these make up the nature of this body, and through these he feels pain or enjoys health. Now he enjoys the most perfect health when these elements are duly proportioned to one another in respect of compounding, power and bulk, and when they are perfectly mingled. — Hippocrates

As to spelling the very frequent word though with six letters instead of two, it is impossible to discuss it, as it is outside the range of common sanity. In comparison such a monstrosity as phlegm for flem is merely disgusting. — George Bernard Shaw

How about a drop of something to cut the phlegm?
Why don't you stay sober today?
We didn't come to New York to stay sober. — Dashiell Hammett

I settle for a radio station that's currently playing a Tom Waits track. That man has so much gravel in his voice that, if he coughed, you could build a road with the contents of his phlegm. — Mark Capell

How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? — Joseph Heller

Imperturbability means coolness and presence of mind under all circumstances, calmness amid storm, clearness of judgment in moments of grave peril, immobility, impassiveness, or, to use an old and expressive word, phlegm. — William Osler

Wednesday is pizza day at Chadham High. The lunchroom smells like a cross between a sewer and a dead skunk. Chadham High pizza consists of a cardboard crust and sauce made of mud, topped with some kind of fungus that looks suspiciously like phlegm pretending to be cheese. — Huston Piner

AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball. AM
said it with the bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm, drowning me from within. AM said it with the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers. AM said it with the taste of maggoty pork. AM touched me in every way I had ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside my mind. — Harlan Ellison

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings? — Graham Swift

And he'd looked straight back at her, holding her professional eye contact, and said yes, thankyou doctor, I do understand, yes. And he'd coughed, hard, repeatedly, spraying blooded phlegm into his handkerchief as to prove how much he understood.
Yes, thankyou doctor, I understand.
Things are not exactly one hundred percent the way we would like them to be. — Jon McGregor