Quotes & Sayings About Suffocation

A man's spirit is free, but his pride binds him with chains of suffocation in a prison of his own insecurities — Jeremy Aldana

The factory of love encompasses all, but on some days, does it seem to be one of suffocation, squeezing its target too tightly? And on other days not tight enough? Or maybe that is the breath of a living love knowing when to protect, when to release, and when to protect again. For we are the products of an active love - the Father the creator, the Son the perfecter, the Spirit the supervisor - but just like in a factory, to deny the process is to ultimately create a defect of oneself. — Criss Jami

I pull her pillow over my face to breathe in her scent. It's torture, it's heaven, and for a moment I contemplate death by suffocation. Get a grip, Grey. — E.L. James

The life I know now is the only one that matters. The suffocation, the luxury, the sleepless nights, and the dead bodies. I've always been taught to focus on power and pain, gaining and inflicting.
I grieve nothing.
I take everything.
It's the only way I know how to live in this battered body. — Tahereh Mafi

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing - or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God - the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves. — C.S. Lewis

The slugs are ascending this steep city staircase that leads up to a huge Catholic church, essentially signifying their slow crawl towards death. The work reminds us of religion, mortality, natural decay, and the slow suffocation of commercialized societies. — Florentijn Hofman

One of my inspirations, Harry Houdini, remains an icon of the art because he defied our primal fears. His demonstrations in the early 20th century, especially his escape from the Chinese water torture cell, represented triumph over suffocation, drowning, disorientation and helplessness. — Criss Angel

The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation - liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable - while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets. — Herbert Marcuse

So many things seemed to come in plastic bags now that it was difficult to keep track of them. The main thing was not to throw it away carelessly, better still to put it away in a safe place, because there was a note printed on it which read 'To avoid danger of suffocation keep this wrapper away from babies and children'. They could have said from middle-aged and elderly persons too, who might well have an irresistible urge to suffocate themselves. — Barbara Pym

Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Required to live in the Middle Ages, someone from the Graeco-Roman period would have died a wretched death by suffocation, just as a savage inevitably would in the midst our civilization. Now, there are times when a whole generation gets caught to such an extent between two eras, two styles of life, that nothing comes naturally to it since it has lost all sense of morality, security and innocence. A man of Nietzsche's mettle had to endure our present misery more than a generation in advance. Today, thousands are enduring what he had to suffer alone and without being understood. — Hermann Hesse

The door that would not open no matter how hard you pushed, no matter how long you pounded on it. The screams no one heard. Darkness, hunger, pain. Slow suffocation. One day it occurred to me that I needed to experience the same suffering he had. — Yoko Ogawa

But life changes people. It smothers that kind of larger-than-life woman. Time quiets them down. That firecracker girl you knew in high school - where is she now? It didn't happen to men as much. Those boys often grew up to be masters of the universe. The super successful girls? They seemed to die of slow societal suffocation. So — Harlan Coben

With adolescent Nietzscheanism, she already planned to escape on the world's reversals from the sense of suffocation that seemed to her to be eclipsing her family, her sisters, and mother. She, she told herself, would move brightly along high places and stop to trespass and admire, and if the fine was a heavy one - well, there was no good in saving up beforehand to pay it. Full of these presumptuous resolves, she promised herself that if, in the future, her soul should come starving and crying for bread it should eat the stone she might have to offer without complaint or remorse. Relentlessly she convinced herself that the only thing of any significance was to take what she wanted when she could. She did her best. — Zelda Fitzgerald

Eddie looks at this, mouth dry, the familiar sensation of suffocation starting to tighten down in his chest like locking bolts. — Stephen King

Water temperatures in this range do, in fact, cause physiological changes - one of which is known as the cold-shock response, a "series of reflexes that begin immediately upon sudden cooling of the skin following cold-water immersion." During this reflexive response, "blood pressure, heart rate, and the workload of the heart all increase, making the heart more susceptible to life-threatening rhythms and heart attack. Simultaneously," an online text explained, "gasping begins, followed by rapid and deep breathing. These reflexes can quickly lead to accidental inhalation of water and drowning. This rapid and seemingly uncontrollable over-breathing creates a sensation of suffocation and contributes to feelings of panic. It can also create dizziness, confusion, disorientation, and a decreased level of consciousness. — Sy Montgomery

Maybe that's why he had started to fear suffocation. It wasn't so much drowning in the earth or sea but the feeling that he was sinking into too many expectations, literally getting in over his head.
Wow ... when he started having thoughts like that, he knew he'd been spending too much time with Annabeth. — Rick Riordan

The editing process, to use a slightly grim analogy, is like the slow suffocation of lots of babies. It's like, which finger do you want to cut off first? — Edgar Wright

And I think, What's the opposite of suffocation? — Bill Konigsberg

Ours is an age in which thousands are driven daily from their homelands by the unforgiving brutalities of war, terrorism, political oppression, starvation, disease, economic piracy, and the relentless suffocation of that singular breath which makes human beings individuals. — Aberjhani

There are special nightmares for the daytime sleeper: little nervous dreams tossed into some brief restless moments of unconsciousness and breaking through the surface of the mind to become confused at once with the horror of some waking vision. Such are these awakenings, like an awakening in the grave, when one opens one's eyes, stretched out rigid with clenched hands, waiting for some misery to declare itself; but for a long time it lies to suffocation upon the chest and utters no word. — Iris Murdoch

Hell, he now understood, went beyond simple torture. Hell inflicted agony with intermittent reprieves to maintain the hope of peace. Hell was not endless dark, but rare rays of sunlight to keep one's eyes longing for their bright beauty. Hell forced hours of suffocation beneath the freezing water with times of release to keep one accustomed to the joy of breath, to let needful expectation be repeatedly stabbed by deprivation. — Daniel Ionson

Domestic abuse, also called intimate partner violence, is the systematic suffocation of another person's spirit. — Joanna Hunter

It was rumored, in 1946, that the hangman in Nuremberg adjusted the nooses of some of the condemned to magnify the pain of suffocation. Such sadism was not called for then and is not called for now. But if fornication is wrong, there is no denying that it can bring pleasure. The death of Saddam Hussein at rope's end brings a pleasure that is undeniable, and absolutely chaste in its provenance. — William F. Buckley Jr.

I couldn't imagine it, living a pristine life in this big Georgian house and everything. It seemed heinous. So I left him. I thought I'd go mad, if I stayed. — Sarah Rayner

To start with, the overwhelming majority of serial killers are male,' Hunter explained. 'Female serial killers have a tendency to kill for monetary profit. While that can also be true their male counterparts, it's very unlikely. Sexual reasons top the list for male serial killers. Case studies have also shown that female killers generally kill people close to them, such as husbands, family members, or people dependent on them. Males kill strangers more often. Female serial killers also tend to kill more quietly, with poison or other less violent methods, like suffocation. Male serial killers, on the other hand, show a greater tendency to include torture or mutilation as part of the process of killing. When women are implicated in sadistic homicides, they've usually acted in partnership with a man. — Chris Carter

The visit took place. It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle against pestilence and suffocation. — Victor Hugo

Your baby doesn't need a pillow for her head, and you should not use one. Likewise, it's best to keep stuffed animals out of your baby's crib or cradle; little babies don't care much about them, and they may pose a suffocation — Benjamin Spock

Religion has kept all of us suffocated, I can't raise my voice you can't raise your voice, still they call us fundamentalists. — M.F. Moonzajer

For Alice and Mattia, the high school years were an open wound that had seemed so deep that it could never heal. They had passed through them without breathing, he rejecting the world and she feeling rejected by it, and eventually they had noticed that it didn't make all that much difference. They had formed a defective and asymmetrical friendship, made up of long absences and much silence, a clean and empty space where both could come back to breathe when the walls of their school became too close for them to ignore the feeling of suffocation. — Paolo Giordano

We need some heterodoxy in social science in order for them to avoid death by suffocation under dogmatism. — Bourdieu, Pierre

Okay, stand outa the way. Sometimes when I go to exertin' myself I use up all the air nearby and grown men faint from suffocation. Stand back. There's liable to be crackin' cement and flying steel. Get the women and kids someplace safe. Stand back ... — Ken Kesey

As uncomfortable as it might be, I refuse to let the comfort of being agreed with suffocate my opinions. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

This is my last resort suffocation no breathing don't give a f**k if I cut my arm bleeding this is my last resort ... — Papa Roach

Give me bitter years of sickness, Suffocation, insomnia, fever, Take my child and my lover, And my mysterious gift of song This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays. — Anna Akhmatova

I wish I wrote the way I thought
Obsessively
Incessantly
With maddening hunger
I'd write to the point of suffocation
I'd write myself into nervous breakdowns
Manuscripts spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal nothing
And I'd write about you
a lot more
than I should — Benedict Smith

But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill. — Michael Pollan

Attachment to the external always suffocates inner peace. — Bryant McGill

Christ can forgive you," he whispered, though he didn't believe it. There wasn't a hint of compassion in those ice-blue eyes.
"That's grand," she said.
Her features became again those of the pleasant brown-haired nurse. She smiled, pulled the pillow from under his head, and covered his face. — Stephen M. Irwin

You don't need an ocean to feel like you're drowning. You feel it, between your chest and your throat, the weight of it stretching you outside your self, like a dead fish on the shore. — Malak El Halabi

This was it; the end of the road. A silent death, suffocation. No way to scream, to call for help. — Elie Wiesel

I felt alone, my loneliness suffocated me, and I craved to scream, shout and kill me while seeing all this. However, self-hatred also occupied me. — Shaikh Ashraf

I want to tell you something today, something that I have known for a long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never said it to yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know about you and me and our fate. You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker, a man full of joy and faith, always on the track of what is great and eternal, never content with the trivial and petty. But the more life has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, the greater has you need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and despair that have overtaken you, till you were up to your neck in them. And all that you once knew and loved and revered as beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny, has been of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your faith found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death. Is that true, Harry? Is that your fate? — Hermann Hesse

There are things around us and about, of which I can render no distinct account
Things material and spiritual; heaviness in the atmosphere; a sense of suffocation, anxiety, and above all, that terrible state of existence which the nervous experience when the senses are keenly living and awake and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant. — Edgar Allan Poe

I am happy
Because, I
Found someone
To Blame
For mistakes
Thank God &
You mate,
You ended
My suffocation.

Amen — Rajesh Nanoo

He stares at the open textbook for hours and is distracted by the pain of the parallelogram, which is slanted for ever. His nails scratch the page to straighten its tired limbs. It affects him, the great arrogance of the Equilateral Triangle, the failed aspiration of the octagon to be a circle, the eternal suffocation of the denominator that has to bear the weight of the unjust numerator, the loneliness of Pluto. And the smallness of Mercury, always a mere dot next to a yellow sun. In this world, there is no respect for Mercury. — Manu Joseph

Earth - it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about shorthorn cancer or burn blindness or meteoric dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

When the twilight of all my evenings reaches me, after a long dark day, my complicated thoughts suffocate inside all of my uncomplicated longings.

Evenings refuse to end. And the dawns that constantly swallow up my nights, always shows me an extremely long road I still need to tread, and discover.

And get hurt. — Khadija Rupa

I want to write something that means something to someone ... the reminds them of what a second, a moment, really is ... or that assures them that we are just as lost as they are. I want to write an emotion they are too fragile to let loose, so that my words can do the expression for them, the feeling for them. I want to write beyond the basics and the cliches ... I want to write you, I want to write a long walk on a starry night, I want to write an exhale or an inhale ... or suffocation.
I want to write as clear as my voice could be heard ... that is, if I had anything to say. — Augusten Burroughs

(visions) of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst of such scenes, and in all of them one presence seemed to weigh on me in all these mighty shapes - the presence of something unknown and pitiless. For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me: to the utterly miserable - the unloving and the unloved - there is no religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils. And beyond all these, and continually recurring, was the vision of my death - the pangs, the suffocation, the last struggle, when life would be grasped at in vain. ("The Lifted Veil") — George Eliot

The only interesting thing that can happen in a Swiss bedroom is suffocation by feather mattress. — Dalton Trumbo

Take off your coat."
"Excuse me?"
"Take it off."
"No."
"I want it off."
"Then I suggest you hold your breath. Won't affect me in the slightest, but at least the suffocation will help pass the time for you. [Vishous to Jane] — J.R. Ward

Ghetto living is more than just a feeling of confinement; it is a sense of suffocation too. — Susan Nathan

All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack air and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible. Suffocation of the soul. — Victor Hugo

I'm sure we were all feeling blessed on this ferryboat among the humps of very green
in the sunlight almost coolly burning, like phosphorus
islands, and the water of inlets winking in the sincere light of day, under a sky as blue and brainless as the love of God, despite the smell, the slight, dreamy suffocation, of some kind of petroleum-based compound used to seal the deck's seams. — Denis Johnson

Drifting away from one's culture leaves one stranded in the middle of nowhere till the time his suffocation strangles him. — Q.M. Sidd

Michael Brown's death and the suffocation of Eric Garner in New York for selling untaxed cigarettes indicate something is wrong with criminal justice in America. — Rand Paul

Not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul. — Tom Robbins

Two years ago," she says, "I was afraid of spiders, suffocation, walls that inch slowly inward and trap you between them,getting thrown out of Dauntless, uncontrollable bleeding, getting run over by a train, my father's death,public humiliation, and kidnapping by men without faces."
Everyone stares blankly at her.
"Most of you will have anywhere from ten to fifteen years in your fear landscapes. That is the average number," she says.
"What's the lowest number someone has gotten?" asks Lynn.
"In recent years," says Lauren, "four."
I have not looked at Tobias since we were in the cafeteria,but I can't help but look at him now. He keeps his eyes trained on the floor. I knew that four was a low number, low enough to merit a nickname,but I didn't know it was less than half the average.
I glare at my feet.He's exceptional. And now he won't even look at me. — Veronica Roth

The family home is where the deepest resentments grow, subtle, relentless as moss, the furring of surfaces organic and gradual, as though life were no longer flesh and blood but bricks and mortar, a suffocation. — Charles Lambert

I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush. — Henry James

When I got to college, when I finally fled the suffocation that I'd built around myself - because, to my father's credit, he'd never asked me to captain our plagued family's ship - it all collapsed. — Allison Winn Scotch

Percy stared at his jelly donut. He had a rocky history with Nico di Angelo. The guy had once tricked him into visiting Hades's palace, and Percy had ended up in a cell. But most of the time, Nico sided with the good guys. He certainly didn't deserve slow suffocation in a bronze jar, and Percy couldn't stand seeing Hazel in pain.
"We'll rescue him," he promised her. "We have to. The prophecy says he holds the key to endless death. — Rick Riordan

Love is the flow of wind. When it stops, you feel suffocated. — Himanshu Chhabra

According to Hugh Thomas, author of 'A History of the World', the greatest medical advance in history has been garbage collection. The greatest psychological advance in history is just around the corner and will also have to do with cleaning up. Cleaning up lies and "coming out of the closet" is getting more attention these days. Some day we will look back on these years of suffocation in bullsh*t in the same way we look back on all the years people lived in, and died from, their garbage. — Brad Blanton

This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of Greek fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision would have been capable of seriously upsetting the spectral conformity of the
bourgeoisie.
In comparison with the lucidity of van Gogh, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous terminology. To a man, this whole gang of pected scoundrels and patented quacks are all erotomaniacs. — Antonin Artaud

Seneca had an extreme trick for practising amor fati. He was asthmatic, and attacks brought him almost to the point of suffocation. He often felt that he was about to die, but he learned to use each attack as a philosophical opportunity. While his throat closed and his lungs strained for breath, he tried to embrace what was happening to him: to say "yes" to it. I will this, he would think; and, if necessary, I will myself to die from it. When the attack receded, he emerged feeling stronger, for he had done battle with fear and defeated it. — Sarah Bakewell

We put suffocation warnings on all the - on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the United States or for sale with an item in the United States. We put warnings on coffee cups to tell us that the contents may be hot. And we seem to think that any item sharper than a golf ball is too sharp for children under the age of 10. — Gever Tulley

A man can suffocate on courtesy. — Henry David Thoreau

Since I was dead - or worse than dead, buried alive in a body that might as well be a coffin except it denied me the pleasure of suffocation - I figured I should be allowed to grieve. — Robin Wasserman

He had never admitted he had a problem, and maybe if he had she would have stayed longer or tried harder. As it was, she simply felt free now. Being with him had been a long, slow suffocation. Caring for someone who didn't care one bit about changing was like being frayed thin. He hadn't wanted what she had to give. She wasn't really sure what it would be like to — Lauren Blakely

I don't mean to insinuate that you are unfeeling or stifled of life ... excuse me on
that one. I just meant to ask you how you breathe when you are down here reading or
writing."
He smiled. "I have five years more experience in breathing on this earth than you. I
know when it is I can breathe and when it is I can't and I know just what to do when
such a thing as suffocation occurs."
I can't believe it, there is actually a qualitative property to every breath
taken ... That must be wonderful. You must also know your cells are degenerating five
years faster than mine."
He smiled again, the same relaxed annoying way. "I get that you find it amusing to
liken me to my cadavers. It's not the first time you've done it, but truly we are not in
lieu to play smart."
I was wondering if you could call the cadaver of a smart man, a smart cadaver. I've
always wondered. — Dew Platt

Suffocation is a cruel way to go. — Arlaina Tibensky

She waited for the suffocation of sleep. — Markus Zusak

Burying your head in the sand does not make you invisible it only leads to suffocation. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

As long as through the workings of laws and customs there exists a damnation-by-society artificially creating hells in the very midst of civilization and complicating destiny, which is divine, with a man-made fate; as long as the three problems of the age are not resolved: the debasement of men through proletarianization, the moral degradation of women through hunger, and the blighting of children by keeping them in darkness; as long as in certain strata social suffocation is possible; in other words and from an even broader perspective, as long as there are ignorance and poverty on earth, books of this kind may serve some purpose. Victor Hugo, Hauteville House, 1 January 1862 — Victor Hugo

If your talking about the Summerdale house and the bodies found there, we feel that some of them died of drug overdose, then buried alive. Trouble is the state never did toxicology on the victims, as they wouldn't fit with their theory that they were all strangled. Even Dr. Stein say that the 13 died of suffocation and 10 were left undetermined, which leads me to believe that there's ... that they were not killed the way the state wants you to believe. — John Wayne Gacy

Fear releases power. Man might be more tolerable, less fractious and smug, if he had more to fear. I do not mean fear of the intangible, the suffocation of the introvert, but physical fear, cold sweating fear for one's life, fear of the unseen menacing beast, imminent, bristly, tusked and terrible, ravening for one's own hot saline blood. — J.A. Baker

So while you're getting ripped apart head to toe as you fall into a black hole, you will also extrude through the fabric of space and time, like toothpaste squeezed through a tube. To all the words in the English language that describe ways to die (e.g., homicide, suicide, electrocution, suffocation, starvation) we add the term spaghettification. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation. But you know since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn? — Lu Xun

Master Bates saw something so exquisitely ludicrous in this reply, that he burst into another laugh; which laugh, meeting the coffee he was drinking, and carrying it down some wrong channel, very nearly terminated in his premature suffocation. — Charles Dickens

V settled back against the pillows and measured the hard line of her chin.
"Take off your coat."
"Excuse me?"
"Take it off."
"No."
"I want it off."
"Then I suggest you hold your breath. Won't affect me in the slightest, but at least the suffocation will help pass the time for you. — J.R. Ward