Smothering Quotes & Sayings

On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word. — Robert Graves

I live in a shrinking world where the only thing I can trust is Maven's obsession. Like the manacles, it is a shield and a slow, smothering death. — Victoria Aveyard

You may adore Love You Forever, but I hear it as a story about an overbearing and smothering mother who infantilizes her son and can only tell him she loves him when he is fast asleep. I also contend that she drugs his cocoa. And that when the man's baby daughter wakes up sixteen years later and finds him fondling her in her room, she will be calling 911 and going into therapy. — Jane Yolen

I woke up with Mac smothering my face. I don't know what it is about cats and the whole "the rest of the bed is not good enough for me, I want to be where your head is" action, but fortunately, he's cute, so I let him live. — Kate Danley

Her streak of independence, which had first brought her to this unfriendly city, was in studied defiance of her smothering appetite for security. If she gave in to those loving appeals she knew she would take root in domestic soil and not look up and out again for another year. In which time, what adventures might have passed her by? — Clive Barker

Your heart is smothering under your small ambitions. — Timothy Keller

Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can't ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there's something wrong; there's something far far wrong; ye're no a good man, ye're just no a good man. Edging back into awareness, of where ye are: here, slumped in this corner, with these thoughts filling ye. And oh christ his back was sore; stiff, and the head pounding. He shivered and hunched up his shoulders, shut his eyes, rubbed into the corners with his fingertips; seeing all kinds of spots and lights. Where in the name of fuck ... — James Kelman

The genteel is a mighty catafalque of service-with-a-smile and flattering solicitude smothering every spontaneous movement of thought or feeling. — Marshall McLuhan

ignorant editors and a smothering patron - produced the sort of dependence that affects, — Zora Neale Hurston

If you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself into your dreams. — Clive Barker

Everyone, from every corner of the globe, was horrified to learn Americans intentionally destroy the entire nutritional value of salads by smothering them in thick condiments made of buttermilk and sugar. — Brian David Bruns

If you have a smothering parent, the effect it can apparently have on a child is to give them, in equal doses, a sense of too much self-esteem, because they are mummy's little princess or prince, and low self-esteem. It affects future relationships. — Hugh Grant

A distant love that waits to be together, is by far the most difficult relationship. It's like lighting a candle, and adoring the long flame and robust glow. Until time sets in like wax, overflowing deeper and deeper into the wick, leaving a sparse flame struggling to live. This is where most distant relationships fade, with the wax smothering the flame. This kind of relationship takes patience, hope, unconditional love, trust and strength, all centered around God. If the flame endures to the end, and the two come together, only then will it feel as if the candle was tipped and all the wax came pouring out, when the flame is revived, long and glowing again. — Anthony Liccione

When the entire world is built on death and horror, when existence is a constant state of panic, it's hard to get worked up about any one thing. Specific fears have become irrelevant. We've replace them with a smothering blanket far worse. — Isaac Marion

Alcohol units: 5. Drowning sorrows. Cigarettes: 23. Fumigating sorrows. Calories: 3,856. Smothering sorrows in fat duvet. — Helen Fielding

It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed - who cannot speak for themselves. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,
With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;
And men are whithered before their prime
By the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.
And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed,
In the smothering reek of mill and mine;
And death stalks in on the struggling crowd
But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine — George W. Sears Nessmuk

In London, she'd overheard more than one matron decrying what they considered Esme Byron's inappropriate eccentricities, aghast that she was allowed so much personal freedom and the ability to voice opinions they considered unsuitable for an unmarried young woman barely out of the schoolroom. But her family always stood by her, proud of her artistic talent and uniformly deaf to the complaints of any critics who might say she needed a firmer hand.
'What must Ned and Mama be thinking now?' Were they regretting that they had not listened to those critics? Wishing they'd kept a tighter rein on her activities rather than letting her venture out as she chose?
But she would have gone mad being constrained and confined the way she knew most girls her age were. She could never have been borne the suffocating restrictions, the smothering tedium of being expected to go everywhere with a chaperone in tow, or worse, being cooped up inside doing embroidery or playing the pianoforte. — Tracy Anne Warren

Born Losers is a beautiful piece of writing. Scott Sandage is history's Dickens; his bleak house, the late nineteenth century world of almost anonymous American men who failed. With wit and sympathy, Sandage illuminates the grey world of credit evaluation, a little studied smothering arm of capitalism. This is history as it should be, a work of art exploring the social cost of our past. — William S. McFeely

Mastery in poetry consists largely in the instinct for not ruining or smothering or tinkering with moments of vision. — Edmund Blunden

Maybe happiness is just finding the right people at the right time."
"But how do you find them?"
...
"But say you do find the right people - how do you love them without smothering them? ... How do you not suffocate them with all the love you've built up in their absence?"
"You don't. And that's the whole point - it works in a way it just wouldn't with other people. — Simon Van Booy

When I found myself alone in my bedroom that evening, an intolerable anguish embraced my soul and body. My boredom had become almost like fear. A wall of rain separates me from the rest of the world, far from all passion, far from life, and is closing me in a gray nightmare. I am with strange beings who are barely human, who have cold and discolored blood, and whose hearts stopped beating a long time ago. I opened my suitcase and looked at my train schedule. A train! At any hour of the day or night, it does not matter! I am smothering here. My — Andre Gide

Normal was a lot more tempting when it was out of reach. Once normal had been a heavy, smothering blanket she feared being trapped beneath. But now normal felt fragile, as though she could unravel it all just by teasing out a single string. — Holly Black

Is it within us all, when the memories of war have faded, to so want to be a part of something great that we throw aside the quiet, the calm, the mundane, the peace itself? Do we collectively come to equate peace with boredom and complacency? Perhaps we hold these embers of war within us, dulled only by sharp memories of the pain and the loss, and when that smothering blanket dissipates with the passage of healing time, those fires flare again to life. — R.A. Salvatore

Why, if it had been--a smothering instead of a wedding, — Charles Dickens

Anything in your life that's acting as a security blanket is only smothering the person you were born to be. — Mandy Hale

And his soul plunged downward, drowning in that deep pit: he felt that could never again escape from this smothering flood of pain and ugliness, from the eclipsing horror and pity of it all. And as he walked, he twisted his own neck about, and beat the air with his arm like a wing, as if he had received a blow in his kidneys. He felt that he might be clean and free if he could only escape into a single burning passion -- hard, and hot, and glittering -- of love, hatred, terror, or disgust. But he was caught, he was strangling, in the web of futility. — Thomas Wolfe

It hit him that his own form of loneliness was a luxury, one as chosen and as paid for as three weeks in Kenya's velds or a cherry red Ferrari. Real loneliness wasn't something an assistant scoped out and got a good price on. Real loneliness was smothering and it stank of hopelessness. — Douglas Coupland

And I thought: I shall remember this all my life. The peril, the running, the howling of the dogs, the smothering. Then the happiness - of action, of leaping. Then the green sweetness of distance. And the trees: their thickness and their compassion, all around. — Mary Oliver

a deep smothering emptiness — Bell Hooks

My heart sinks. I guess I should be glad he doesn't care, but I'm not. He's supposed to care. Mom cares so much, it's smothering; but that doesn't mean he's allowed to do this, to check out. And suddenly I need him to care. I need him to give me something so I know he's still here, still Dad. — Victoria Schwab

He spins us both, wrapping us in his wings until I'm dazed and giggling.
"I wanted to lift you above me and swing you in circles until we were both dizzy and laughing," he murmurs against my neck as we tumble to the ground, trapped beneath his tented wings.
My body aches on impact - but it's a delicious ache. I can hardly breathe with the weight of his ribs covering mine, with the scent of his tobacco surrounding me, smothering and intoxicating. The curve of his smiling mouth glides along my collarbone and I gasp at the velvety sensation. I force his head up so I can look at him ... break the spell.
He slips the bejeweled headband from my hair, sweeping stray strands from my face. The slickness of his gloves grazes my eye markings.
"I wanted to kiss your lips and share your breath," he says softly as he leans close. — A.G. Howard

I've spoken to Sid," she admits. "He says he's never seen Charlie so bad. He won't eat, he's lost weight and he looks terrible. Sid says it's the first time he's ever been so bored by him that he's considered smothering him. — Lily Morton

We must remove government's smothering hand from where it does harm; we must seek to revitalize the proper functions of government. We do these things to set loose again the energy and the ingenuity of the American people. We do these things to reinvigorate those social and economic institutions which serve as a buffer and a bridge between the individual and the state - and which remain the real source of our progress as a people. — Ronald Reagan

When the Nightingales
turn out the light
and the dark,
dressed for the opera,
begins its smothering,

I summon my guard dog.

I fashion the fierce shape of him
with fingers and thumbs,
and leash him to the wall.

The moon strokes his dew claws.

He gets me through
another long
Kubrick night. — Karen Knight

I fall against the wall with her, smothering her mouth with mine in an assault of lust, love, kisses. I want it all over her. To fill her with what I feel inside of me. A star? A wish? I wish we weren't in the damn hallway of the store. I wish this were my bed and I could go slower. I wish time could cease and this moment could go on forever. I wish I could appreciate all of the sounds I'm regrettably swallowing down to keep us a secret. Her whispered pleas for more. More. I wish I had more. — Pella Grace

She didn't heed the warning. "So they pay for everything? Doesn't that make you feel guilty?"
Every f**king day. "Was it your money that bought those Louboutin's ... or Braden's?"
Ellie choked on her laughter, smothering the sound quickly in a gulp of her drink. I patted her on the back, aiding her in her pretense. When I looked back at Holly she was glaring at me, her face flushed red to her hairline.
Point made. Question deflected. Spoiled bitch put in her place.
"So people can get married at Stirling Castle, huh?" I turned back to Jenna and our earlier conversation. "I've only visited it once, but it's a beautiful venue ... — Samantha Young

I could almost taste the thick, mouth-watering fog of manly power that seeped from his pores, smothering me beneath it. Just being near him filled me with an overpowering sense of intimidation, excitement, and nervous surrender all rolled into one general package of an amazing turn-on. — Johnny Stone

The scrutiny was smothering. Right now it seemed that being Vendan within these outpost walls was preferable to being the impudent royal who had abandoned their precious prince at the altar. — Mary E. Pearson

What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the grey drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from the smothering confinement, it is natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion — William Styron

But say you do find the right people - how do you love them without smothering them? ... How do you not suffocate them with all the love you've built up in their absence? — Simon Van Booy

Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
How you explain that? --I explain that, Mr
Bones,
terms o' your bafflin odd sobriety.
Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,
what could happen bad to Mr Bones?
--If life is a handkerchief sandwich,

in a modesty of death I join my father
who dared so long agone leave me.
A bullet on a concrete stoop
close by a smothering southern sea
spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.
--You is from hunger, Mr Bones,

I offers you this handkerchief, now set
your left foot by my right foot,
shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
hum a little, Mr Bones.
--I saw nobody coming, so I went instead. — John Berryman

Megan wanted to groan. "You guys are smothering me."
Braden leaned against the wall, watching it all, never speaking. Sexy and silent. Okay, so he had a few things going for him.
"Get used to it," Her father's voice brooked no refusal. "Until I leave this world, you are still my daughter and still under my protection."
"Protect Lance." She waved her hand at her smirking cousin. "He's in more danger than I am if he keeps pissing me off. Share the love, Dad. — Lora Leigh

Four of Dan's sisters had made it. They wore white sundresses they'd altered so three spelled out FOX. The fourth sported a fox paw that was already starting to lose a toe pad. They practically crushed Dan, smothering her with a group hug before fawning over her. — Nora Sakavic

And I have to admit to myself that although I have plenty of sound reasons for not being a father - I know I would also be inconsistent and moody, alternately smothering and neglectful, plus I will never, ever be able to afford riding lessons or braces, let alone college - one of the reasons I don't want children is fear. I'm afraid that if I ever did have children of my own I would love them so painfully it would rip my soul in half, that I would never again have a waking moment free from the terror that something bad might ever happen to them. — Tim Kreider

Roman Catholics utter their Papal edicts, Protestants quote their Bible, Fundamentalists declare their orthodox theological dogmas, and we are all expected to renounce private reflection and peacefully acquiesce to these pronouncements. And the result is that the dignity of the person is violated by such oppressive, intelligence-smothering forms of communication. — Robert H. Schuller

I hated this love that I had for my family - love that demanded my time and energy, that sought to control my life down to every thought and action.
I now realize that it was not love but an unhealthy attachment, born out of a need for security and a sense of duty. — Indu Muralidharan

Unfortunately, every time someone said "debriefing," the entire flock had one image: someone's tighty-whities disappearing in a flash. We were smothering our giggles, but it was getting harder. Coupled with the whole "naval this, and naval that," with its undeniable belly-button connotations, we were essentially turning into a sugar-jacked, sleep-deprived flock of incoherent, silly, recombinant-DNA goofballs. This was not going to end well. — James Patterson

I was surprised to learn that there was yet another type of tired. On Seram we'd had physical tired. The type of tired when a thousand muscles are screaming at you to quit walking, sweat's running off you, and only the energy you manage to generate from gritting your teeth helps you take the next step. That type of tired can keep the emotional tired safely at bay-the tired when sadness is a physical weight, a thick smothering, aching thing. That was the dangerous type of tired we couldn't afford on Seram. That's the type of tired that makes you want to sit still and listen to despair. — Lisa McKay

The surface of Amsterdam thrives on these mutual acts of surveillance, the neighborly smothering of a person's spirit. — Jessie Burton

You are a child if you thought I didn't know, for all your smothering yourself under that hot lap robe. Of course, I knew. Why else do you think I've been -
He stopped suddenly and a silence fell between them. He picked up the reins and clucked to the horse. — Margaret Mitchell

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. — Wilfred Owen

If my battery-operated boyfriend could talk, he's probably say I was smothering him. — Priscilla West

Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others
first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enormous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one's own interests and desires. Carried to its "perfection," it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother. — Jean Baker Miller

I've just learned that love is a very fleeting thing, so we - then we have it; we need to hold on to it but hold on to it in a gracious fashion. Not in the smothering but more so just a covering kind of love. — Betty Wright

I want you to judge me without thinking about it.
I want you to give me advice without considering my opinion.
I want you to expecting anything without the need to trust me.
I want you to decide for me with all the care in the world.
I want you to help me without smothering me.
I want you to decide without seeing my point of view.
I want you to hug me without holding me...
I want you to feel protected in my presence without me having to lie.
I want you to be close without suffocating me.
I want you to know everything without knowing anything...
I want you to know that both love and friendship should always be Unconditional. — Stefan Dimov

I always listen," Ranger said. "I don't always agree. I have a problem right now that I can't seem to solve by myself. I need you to help me find my daughter. And there's an even bigger problem involved. I feel a financial and moral obligation to my daughter. I send child support, I send birthday and Christmas presents, I visit when I'm invited. But I've kept myself emotionally distanced. I'm not emotionally distanced from you. I couldn't live with myself if something happened to you because I was using you to find someone . . . even if that someone was my daughter. So I have to make every effort to keep you safe." "You're a little smothering. — Janet Evanovich

What she revealed was not sexy lingerie, but a supportive piece of athletic equipment. After the consolation match that preceded the championship game, both Brazilian and Norwegian players removed their jerseys and exchanged them on the floor of the Rose Bowl. Chastain had previously removed her jersey after regulation to air it out. While training in Florida, the players frequently doffed their shirts after practice in the smothering heat, and they sometimes gave interviews in their sports bras, which were items of utility, not titillation. Chastain 'has brought instant attention to a piece of clothing that is humble and practical, not a traditional bra of shine and lace and cleavage, but a sturdy compression garment,' wrote Ann Gerhart of the Washington Post. 'The sports bra is the cloth symbol of Title IX's success. — Jere Longman

Your arrogant God wants to spend the rest of his life smothering you with his love and his body. Jesse — Jodi Ellen Malpas

Why, I've been all over the world, I tell you, and fairly loafed and lolled in every conceivable sort of ease and luxury, but the Soul of me - the wild, restless, breathless, discontented soul of me - never sat down before in all its life - I say, until my frightened hand cuddled into his broken one. I tell you I don't pretend to explain it, I don't pretend to account for it; all I know is - that smothering there under all that horrible wreckage and everything - the instant my hand went home to his, the most absolute sense of serenity and contentment went over me. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Apart from the most obvious cases, like the Oriental Bittersweet vine, escaped from private gardens and smothering the mountains one acre at a time, the most painful proof of man's destruction is not what you can see right in front of you; it's what you will never see again. — Wil S. Hylton

She banged her knuckles until they ached to get the attention of the living flesh behind the glass, and would have smashed her fist through the window just to touch him, feel his heat, the only thing that could protect her from a smothering death of dry roses. — Toni Morrison

If someone tells you they love turkey smothered with cranberry sauce, that they love it more than anything else in the world, you might spend the day roasting that someone a turkey and smothering it with cranberry sauce. If that same someone then takes one little bite and says, 'That'll be all, thank you,' you'll likely go red in the face and hurl both these turkeys our the nearest window because clearly, this person never loved turkey smothered with cranberry sauce in the first place.
Little bites are never enough when you love something. When you love something, you want it all. That's how it works. And that's how it was for Archer. Archer didn't want a little taste of adventure with a side of leftover discoveries. Archer wanted the whole turkey and he wanted it stuffed with enough salts and spices to turn his taste buds into sparklers. — Nicholas Gannon

Our job is to sell our clients' merchandise ... not ourselves. Our job is to kill the cleverness that makes us shine instead of the product. Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product message. — William Bernbach

If it has ever been your fantasy to have a tall sexy Viking smothering you, let me tell you it's nowhere near as much fun as it initially sounds — J.D. Nixon

Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis. — Carl Jung

While this may look loving, when we struggle with an idol of dependence, we're in fact not loving people as much as we're using them to fulfill our need to belong, be liked, and be desired. This explains why some friends and family members can be so demanding, smothering, and needy. It also explains why we're so easily inflated by praise and deflated by criticism. It's as if others have the ability to determine our identity for that day based on a word or even a glance — Mark Driscoll

The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels. — Kate Chopin

Need twisted deep and low inside her. It twined through her body like kudzu vines growing out of control, taking over and smothering what little good sense she had left. — Cat Johnson

She remained mute, not knowing that he was smothering his affection for her. She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope. — Thomas Hardy

Darkness gathered there, smothering out the sunlight. As the fleet headed towards it, it threatened to smother them too. — Dean F. Wilson

Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash. — Chuck Palahniuk

A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable. — Robert Bork

Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal. — Ingmar Bergman

Are Cleo and Zadie beautiful?" I asked his throat in an uncontrolled utterance because even if I already knew, I still had to know, and felt his fingers bunch my hair reflexively. "They are," he rumbled. "So, so beautiful, baby." "I gave you them," I told him, fading, finally fucking fading. "You did, Millie," he agreed softly. "I gave you them. I gave you that Daddy they call you that warms you to your bones." He pulled me deeper into his arms, shifting into me, taking me to my back, smothering me with his weight and heat, drowning me with his scent, but he said nothing. Still fading, I murmured, "I gave you them. — Kristen Ashley

The worst part of going numb was that it took away everything but this, the smothering need to hurt, to break, to kill, pouring over him like a thick blanket of syrup until he panicked and brought the physical sensations back. — V.E Schwab

The camembert with its venison scent defeats the Marolles and Limbourg dull smells; It spreads its exhalation, smothering the other scents under its surprising breath abundance. — Emile Zola

This is particularly true of those who "love too much" and those who tend to lose themselves in their relationships. Sometimes our love becomes distorted by our feelings of insecurity and our fear of abandonment. This is the often the case with those who become overly controlling and overly smothering of their partner. Others become emotionally abusive because of their fear of intimacy. — Beverly Engel

Strive to see God in all things without exception. Do not smother yourself ... If you start smothering yourself with a host of cares and longings and wishes ... you will be disabling yourself from serving God with all your heart. — Saint Francis De Sales

One of the advantages a sister has when arguing with a brother is that she is under no obligation to be tactful. If she wishes to tell him that he is an idiot and ought to have his head examined, she can do so and, going further, can add that it is a thousand pities that no-one ever thought of smothering him with a pillow in his formative years. — P.G. Wodehouse

Ah," Sean said, smothering a laugh. "The brilliant plan falling apart? Wow. Wish I'd seen that coming. Oh. Wait. I did. — Maureen Child

An awkward silence descended between us. Where did that phrase come from? I wonder. Silence descended. Descended from where exactly? Was it hovering over us like the alien spaceship in Independence Day? Maybe it wasn't really silence so much as it was the smothering weight of something unsaid, words we'd kept at bay, kept in the air, by talking about other things. — Jacqueline Carey