Suffocated Quotes

The more a psychologist - a born, an unavoidable psychologist and soul-diviner - turns his attention to the more select cases and individuals, the greater is his danger of being suffocated by sympathy: he NEEDS sternness and cheerfulness more than any other man. For the corruption, the ruination of higher men, of the more unusually constituted souls, is in fact, the rule: it is dreadful to have such a rule always before one's eyes. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The first of a thousand lies. Truth flowed to Micah Quill, was sucked in and disappeared, and emerged again looking ever so much like it used to, but changed subtly, at the edges, where none would notice, so that simple truth became a complicated fabric indeed, one that could wrap you up so tightly and close you off from the air until you suffocated in it. ~ Orson Scott Card

He was a hidden God, full of secrecy. Truly, he did not come by his son otherwise than by secret ways. At the door of his faith stands adultery.
Whoever extols him as a God of love, does not think highly enough of love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge? But the loving one loves irrespective of reward and requital.
When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh and revengeful, and built himself a hell for the delight of his favourites.
At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old grandmother. [...] and one day he suffocated of his all-too-great pity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Were the situation not so completely to her disadvantage, she might have enjoyed the prospect of Simon Hunt rendered absolutely speechless.
At first his face was blank, as if he was having tremendous difficulty absorbing the fact that she was standing before him dressed only in a chemise, corset, and drawers. His gaze slid over her, slowly coming to rest on her flushed face. Another moment or two of suffocated silence, and Hunt swallowed hard before speaking in a rusty-sounding voice. "I probably shouldn't ask. But what the hell are you doing?"
The words unlocked Annabelle from her paralysis. She certainly could not stand there and converse with him while she was clad in her undergarments. But her dignity - or the threads that remained of it - demanded that she not screech idiotically and dash for her clothes the way Evie and Daisy were doing. Settling for a compromise, she strode briskly to her discarded gown and clasped it to her front as she turned to face Simon Hunt once more. "We're playing Rounders," she said, her voice far higher-pitched than usual.
Hunt glanced around the scene before settling on her again. "Why did you - "
"One can't run properly in skirts," Annabelle interrupted. "I should think that would be obvious."
Absorbing that, Hunt averted his face swiftly, but not before she saw the sudden flash of his grin. "Never having tried it, I'll have to take your word on that. ~ Lisa Kleypas

For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be - or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity. ~ Margaret Atwood

To be acknowledged that we do not believe in their misleading notion and fallacy, today, tomorrow and forever even if it costs us our life. They have suffocated people for hundreds of years and if we don't stop them today no one else would do it tomorrow. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

She loved four brothers, and she wouldn't say they suffocated her, though the hum of their hovering could be deafening at times. FBI, Special Forces, firefighter, cop. It was like her very own big-brother protection force. ~ Claudia Connor

Swathed in silk, I feel like a caterpillar in a cocoon awaiting metamorphosis. I always supposed that to be a peaceful condition. At first it is. But as I journey into the night, I feel more and more trapped, suffocated by the slippery bindings, unable to emerge until I have transformed into something of beauty. I squirm, trying to shed my ruined body and unlock the secret to growing flawless wings. Despite enormous effort, I remain a hideous creature, fired into my current form by the blast from the bombs. ~ Suzanne Collins

Your words were powerful. Your words suffocated me. I was reaching for you - I was reaching for the person who caused me so much pain, to save me. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

On re-entering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia. ~ Evariste Regis Huc

I was starting to feel really suffocated, using the sequencer. ~ Tom Jenkinson

War isn't a TV show with plot twists to keep the viewers interested. The proliferation of images and blanket media coverage have suffocated the life out of old-style photojournalism. ~ David Burnett

That image - of a little child being suffocated, or almost suffocated, by others who thought the whole thing was a game - melded with the furtive nocturnal slugs, and my solitary pacing and singing, and the separate, claustrophobic stairway, and the charmless abstract painting, and the gold-framed mirror, and the slithery green satin bedspread, and became inseperable from them. It wasn't a cheerful composite. As a memory, it is more like a fog bank than a sunlit meadow.
Yet I think of that period as having been a happy time in my life.
Happy is the wrong word. Important. ~ Margaret Atwood

The Flies And The Honey-Pot
A NUMBER of Flies were attracted to a jar of honey which had been overturned in a housekeeper's room, and placing their feet in it, ate greedily. Their feet, however, became so smeared with the honey that they could not use their wings, nor release themselves, and were suffocated. Just as they were expiring, they exclaimed, "O foolish creatures that we are, for the sake of a little pleasure we have destroyed ourselves." Pleasure bought with pains, hurts. ~ Aesop

To share our independence, to me, is synonym with "maturity". Maturity means the combination of courage - to do something - and consideration - to stop doing that when it's required. Kind of like the gas and brake in a vehicle.
"To depend on Love isn't the same as to depend on a single person to feel that connection towards Love. The more Love that flows through any given relationship, the more love that can flow towards other relationships, in contrast, a lack of Love in a relationship calls us to look out for anything else that could make us feel connected, feel accepted.
"Most people aren't ready for the kind of commitment and dedication required to 'merge' in someone else while retaining their individuality, and after a very short time, they feel suffocated and abandon such relationship.
"In order to identify when we are receiving this energy from a particular - limited - individual, or when it is coming from Source, the Love that flows from Source is unlimited and increases constantly, whilst the other one needs constant recharge to continue to function. It's as clear as the difference between sunlight and a torchlight. ~ Nityananda Das

Bob slid his chair back and moved the coal-oil lamp from the kitchen to the sitting room. He said, "Oftentimes things seem impossible up until they're attempted." Then he lidded the chimney glass with his palm and suffocated the light. ~ Ron Hansen

An awful lot of hokum is talked about love, you know. An importance is ascribed to it that is entirely at variance with fact. People talk as though it were self-evidently the greatest of human values. Nothing is less self-evident. Until Plato dressed his sentimental sensuality in a captivating literary form the ancient world laid no more stress on it than was sensible; the healthy realism of the Muslims has never looked upon it as anything but a physical need; it was Christianity, buttressing its emotional claims with neo-Platonism, that made it into the end an aim, the reason, the justification of life. But Christianity was the religion of slaves. It offered the weary and the heavy-laden heaven to compensate them in the future for their misery in this world and the opiate of love to enable them to bear it in the present. And like every drug it enervated and destroyed those who became subject to it. For two thousand years it's suffocated us. It's weakened our wills and lessened our courage. In this modern world we live in we know that almost everything is more important to us than love, we know that only the soft and the stupid allow it to affect their actions, and yet we pay it a foolish lip-service. In books, on the stage, in the pulpit, on the platform the same old sentimental rubbish is talked that was used to hoodwink the slaves of Alexandria. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me, - some of its virus mingled with my blood. No, -in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way. ~ Henry David Thoreau

But whenever the church fails to mediate God's counterintuitive delight in broken people, the pain of sin will only be magnified until it suffocates our souls. Good deeds and spiritual lingo can't heal a human heart suffocated by evil. Only grace can. Rich, embodied, earthy charis. ~ Preston Sprinkle

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a wall and perhaps a stone gutter filled with dry leaves. He did not know, could not know, that he longed for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing things to pieces and the wind carrying the scent of a deer, but something suffocated and rebelled within him and God spoke to him in a dream: "You live and will die in this prison so that a man I know of may see you a certain number of times and not forget you and place your figure and symbol in a poem which has its precise place in the scheme of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you will have given a word to the poem." God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and the animal understood these reasons and accepted his destiny, but, when he awoke, there was in him only an obscure resignation, a valorous ignorance, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a beast. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The funeral pyre technique was abandoned when it became apparent how great was the toll. There was not enough labor to do it nicely, so a man with a flame-thrower was sent down instead, and he cremated them where they lay. Burned alive, suffocated, crushed - men, women, and children indiscriminately killed. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Watching the Commons tribute to Margaret Thatcher was like being suffocated inside a gigantic sticky toffee pudding, but one with nasty bogeys planted inside. There was much of the 'Margaret Thatcher who was lucky enough to know me,' especially from her own side of the House. ~ Simon Hoggart

It was only later that I suffocated under the weight of his arguments, and his darker thoughts articulated. It was only later that our tongues produced landslides, that we became caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant, until we could not find each other, did not trust the words in our own mouths. ~ Hannah Kent

Damn, girl. If I still breathed, I'd be suffocated by how much I want you. ~ Sara Humphreys

They lost their sense of reality, the notion of time, the rhythm of daily habits. They closed the doors and windows again so as not to waste time getting undressed and they walked about the house as Remedios the Beauty had wanted to do and they would roll around naked in the mud of the courtyard, and one afternoon they almost drowned as they made love in the cistern. In a short time they did more damage than the red ants: they destroyed the furniture in the parlor, in their madness they tore to shreds the hammock that had resisted the sad bivouac loves of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and they disemboweled the mattresses and emptied them on the floor as they suffocated in storms of cotton. Although Aureliano was just as ferocious a lover as his rival, it was Amaranta ?rsula who ruled in that paradise of disaster with her mad genius and her lyrical voracity, as if she had concentrated in her love the unconquerable energy that her great-great-grandmother had given to the making of little candy animals. And yet, while she was singing with pleasure and dying with laughter over her own inventions, Aureliano was becoming more and more absorbed and silent, for his passion was self-centered and burning. Nevertheless, they both reached such extremes of virtuosity that when they became exhausted from excitement, they would take advantage of their fatigue. They would give themselves over to the worship of their bodies, discovering that the rest periods of love had unexplored possibilities, ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I hated school. I travelled so much in my early years that I didn't understand the process. I felt suffocated - not like I was some grandiose artist; I just felt like an alien. ~ Dakota Johnson

But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of the Firm. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Humanity has nearly suffocated the globe with carbon dioxide, yet nuclear power plants that produce no such emissions are so mired in objections and obstruction that, despite renewed interest on every continent, it is unlikely another will be built in the United States. ~ Michael Specter

Now - " stretching up on tiptoe, to kiss me on the cheek - "let's both be good, and truthful, and kind to each other, and let's be happy together and have fun always." xxii. SO I SPENT THE night - we ordered in, later, and then went back to bed. But though on some level it was all easy enough pretending everything was the same (because, in some way, hadn't we both been pretending all along?) on another I felt nearly suffocated by the weight of everything unknown, and unsaid, pressing down between us, and later when she lay curled against me asleep I lay awake and stared out the window feeling completely alone. ~ Donna Tartt

In order to abandon the uncomfortable world, I began to linger about in abstraction. Because the world suffocated me with inhibition, an unrestrained fantasy life proceeded to remove me from it for release. It was the natural result of my anxiety to seek some tranquil escape, and my dreams became elaborate, wondrous things to explore in moments when trouble would otherwise have eroded my sense of well-being. I became better and better at dreaming, entering the invisible every time I felt uneasy. Over the years, I refined my fantasies, gliding along languidly in my thoughts, until my gestures were either feeble with hypnotism or ethereal with half-sleep. - Beyond the Furthest Edge of Night ~ Cliff Gogh

I'd loved for five long years, where pain had mingled with kisses and Michael's hugs suffocated me so much that I wasn't sure I could wriggle away enough to gasp for air. It was purple love, ugly and endearing, passionate and bruising like the tiny plum marks one left from sucking on a lover's neck. After loving like that, one needed a break ... ~ Kenya Wright

Yet I couldn't connect this racial purity with the warmth of the toothless, lined Bedouin women who showed me such affection in the hospital. I thought about the Bedouin patients I had attended in Riyadh and what they had taught me of acceptance. Surely these Bedouin were the purest Saudis of all, Daughters of Arabia, borne of tribal forebears who had roamed Arabia before the slick of oil wealth suffocated their culture, washing them up like half-dead seagulls into the new urban metropolis of modern Saudi Arabia. I decided it had to be wealth which made the stark difference. All I had to do was think back to the "real" Saudis I had met in Riyadh, so different than the women sharing this tent with me. ~ Qanta A. Ahmed

My hair and I had a really bad argument. She was being sprayed with alcohol and burnt with irons. She was being over processed and yanked and pulled by weave strings and suffocated by glue. She told me if I didn't straighten up and fly right that she was leaving. ~ Chrisette Michele

I felt suffocated. And alone. More alone than ever. Every year, I ostentatiously crossed out of my address book any friend who'd made a racist remark, neglected those whose only ambition was a new car and a Club Med vacation, and forgot all those who played the Lottery. I loved fishing and silence. Walking the hills. Drinking cold Cassis, Lagavulin, or Oban late into the night. I didn't talk much. Had opinions about everything. Life and death. Good and evil. I was a film buff. Loved music. I'd stopped reading contemporary novels. More than anything, I loathed half-hearted, spineless people. ~ Jean-Claude Izzo

It's very strange to be an imaginary friend. You can't be suffocated and you can't get sick and you can't fall and break your head and you can't catch pneumonia. The only thing that can kill you is a person not believing in you. ~ Matthew Green

- When we feel well after carrying out a certain task. Consequently, everything which causes us to lose our enthusiasm and self respect, is harmful; even if it means power, money or success. I have seen so many people suffocated by success, making mistakes which ended up destroying years of work, yielding to heavy drinking, becoming aggressive, tough, bitter. These people are distant from themselves, and distant from others. ~ Paulo Coelho

Originally, it was believed that witches possessed the power of glamour and according to the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, witches by their glamour could cause the male 'member' to disappear. In modern usage, this meaning has almost disappeared into the background and the power of the term is masked and suffocated by such foreground images as those associated with glamour magazine. ~ Mary Daly

Every crack is also an opening. When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world. Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment - growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking - the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn't die, but falls into the world. ~ Mark Nepo

In the end the number of things he thought of saying all at once nearly suffocated him and he became silent. ~ C.S. Lewis

The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark. ~ Nicole Krauss

It was not a purer realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite. In a thicker, stinking haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt. ~ China Mieville

What would happen to a body that was starved, suffocated and then forced to drink poison? It would first suffer and then die an agonizing death. We willingly starve and suffocate our hearts by turning away form the remembrance of God. And then we poison our hearts through the bad company we keep, the garbage that goes into our eyes and ears, and emanates from our tongue ...
And then we wonder why our heart feels dead. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

My soul is in a reckless way, it's seeking culture untouched by greed, it's seeking places untouched by human spirit, it's seeking places that need love, because my soul is here for love and I feel everywhere I've already been has suffocated every inch of beauty out of me. ~ Nikki Rowe

Darkness surrounded her, suffocated her. She tried to pierce it, but her eyes could find no hint of light. Nothing that would help her escape this prison.
Weight pressed down upon her, heavy enough to crush her bones. And perhaps it had. There was no part of her that didn't hurt so much that she wanted to howl with it. But when she opened her mouth, dirt and dust tried to choke her.
Cold.
Pain.
Silence.
No hope.
Then a voice came to her, burrowing down through the soil and coiling around her.
"When love," a woman began to sing softly, "into my dreams was creeping. I gave my heart into your keeping."
Pure ecstasy.
How she needed that voice, that presence to alleviate the darkness and pain and salvage her sanity.
Tears welled in her eyes as she let the soft song embrace her.
Her breath hitched. ~ Dianne Duvall

So many people seem to spend their lives trying to appear normal, predictable and consistent to themselves and those that surround them. They just end up bored with themselves, bereft of any depth of inner resources, suffocated by the inhibitions that defend their own monolithic identities. ~ Peter J. Carroll

Word from the outside, whether it arrived in a mail sack or a news report, seldom overshadowed the facts of our lives. We talked in facts -- work and weather, the logistics of this fence, that field -- but stories were how we spoke. A good story rose to the surface of a conversation like heavy cream, a thing to be savored and served artfully. Stored in dry wit, wrapped in dark humor, tied together with strings of anecdote, these stories told the chronology of a family, the history of a piece of land, the hardships of a certain year or a span of years, a series of events that led without pause to the present. If the stories were recent, they filtered through the door to my room late at night, voices hushed around the kitchen table as they sorted out this day and held it against others, their laughter sharp and sad and slow to come. Time was the key. Remember the time...and something in the air caught like a whisper. Back when. Back before a summer too fresh and real to talk about, a year's work stripped in a twenty-minute hailstorm; a man's right hand mangled in the belts of a combine, first day of harvest; an only son buried alive in a grain bin, suffocated in a red avalanche of wheat. ~ Judy Blunt

Gerald began - but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash - to pee. ~ Jim Gleeson

It was awful," I tell Luke at his locker. It's on the other side of the hall and I really feel like the air is cleaner over here or something. I almost suffocated trying to stuff my book bag into my own locker, squeezed right between Kimi and her voluptuousness and Wolf and his sexual-awakening-me-ness. ~ Alecia Whitaker

I suffocated for hours, until I turned on ... music. ~ Lisa M. Cronkhite

The wind howled in defiance as viscous clouds suffocated the moon, taking the night as their own. ~ J.D. Barker

Captain! You can't hold them off! I tried! I swear! They've been artificially enhanced, sir! But all the humans died out - there's bones out there by the millions! They were all suffocated by cuteness! The World is full of kiitens, oh the horror!
'My God,' Hadrian said. They've finally did it! All those oh-so-cute-my-cuddy-kittens-here's-a-pic bastards! They finally went and did it! ~ Steven Erikson

it's a terrible feeling when you first fall in love. your mind gets completely taken over, you can't function properly anymore. the world turns into a dream place, nothing seems real. you forget your keys, no one seems to be talking English and even if they are you don't care as you can't hear what they're saying anyway, and it doesn't matter since your not really there. things you cared about before don't seem to matter anymore and things you didn't think you cared about suddenly do. I must become a brilliant cook, I don't want to waste time seeing my friends when I could be with him, I feel no sympathy for all those people in India killed by an earthquake last night; what is the matter with me? It's a kind of hell, but you feel like your in heaven.
even your body goes out of control, you can't eat, you don't sleep properly, your legs turn to jelly as your not sure where the floor is anymore. you have butterflies permanently, not only in your tummy but all over your body - your hands, your shoulders, your chest, your eyes everything's just a jangling mess of nerve endings tingling with fire. it makes you feel so alive. and yet its like being suffocated, you don't seem to be able to see or hear anything real anymore, its like people are speaking to you through treacle, and so you stay in your cosy place with him, the place that only you two understand. occasionally your forced to come up for air by your biggest enemy, Real Life, so you do the minimum then head back down ~ Annabel Giles

Some people steal your oxygen and leave you winded. Some people cut it off completely and you're left suffocated. But other people, the rare ones, pump oxygen into you, just like a breeze fills a wind puppet and gives it the energy to twist and sway. ~ Katie Kacvinsky

The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness. ~ Miriam Toews

We are drawn towards a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it. Sometimes the two motives coincide. Often however they do not. Each is distinct and quite independent. We eat distasteful food, if we have nothing else, because we cannot do otherwise. A moderately greedy man looks out for delicacies, but he can easily do without them. If we have no air we are suffocated, we struggle to get it, not because we expect to get some advantage from it but because we need it. We go in search of sea air without being driven by any necessity, because we like it. In time it often comes about automatically that the second motive takes the place of the first. This is one of the great misfortunes of our race. A man spokes opium in order to attain to a special condition, which he thinks superior; often, as time goes on, the opium reduces him to a miserable condition which he feels to be degrading; but he is no longer able to do without it. ~ Simone Weil

I can't explain how it's different. Why kissing is easy, and being kissed is like being suffocated. ~ Rainbow Rowell

The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and it is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together. Though I care as little about riches as any man, I am a friend to riches because they are capable of good. I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it. But it is impossible to enjoy affluence with the felicity it is capable of being enjoyed, while so much misery is mingled in the scene. the sight of the misery, and the unpleasant sensations it suggests, which, though they may be suffocated cannot be extinguished, are a greater drawback upon the felicity of affluence than the proposed ten per cent upon property is worth. He that would not give the one to get rid of the other has no charity, even for himself. -Agrarian Justice ~ Thomas Paine

Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness. ~ Ingmar Bergman

It was a peculiar odor, the smell of sexual violation, a mixture of rotting flesh and underarm stench. They shivered even though the heat belowdecks would've suffocated the weak. Our desecrated brothers survived because, as best we could, we reminded them of who they were. ~ Daniel Black

In the rare moments I permitted any stillness, I noted a small fluttering at the pit of my belly, a barely perceptible disturbance. The faint whisper of a word would sound in my head: writing. At first I could not say whether it was heartburn or inspiration. The more I listened, the louder the message became: I needed to write, to express myself through written language not only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself. The gods, we are taught, created humankind in their own image. Everyone has an urge to create. Its expression may flow through many channels: through writing, art, or music or through the inventiveness of work or in any number of ways unique to all of us, whether it be cooking, gardening, or the art of social discourse. The point is to honor the urge. To do so is healing for ourselves and for others; not to do so deadens our bodies and our spirits. When I did not write, I suffocated in silence. ~ Gabor Mate

We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. ~ Howard Barker

Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like silkworms, and is suffocated in it. A mouse in a pitch barrel ... thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered. ~ Michel De Montaigne

The forbidden cabinet. The forbidden fruit. That fruit is - a volume, a huge blue-lilac volume with a gold inscription slantwise: Collected Works of A.S. Pushkin. I read the fat Pushkin in the cabinet with my nose in the book and on the shelf, almost in darkness and almost right up against it and even a little bit suffocated by his weight that came right into the throat, and almost blinded by the nearness of the tiny letters. I read Pushkin right into the chest and right into the brain. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

We have made it possible, without gold and without foreign exchange, to maintain the value of the German mark. Behind the German mark stands the German capacity for work, while some foreign countries, suffocated by gold, have been compelled to devalue their currencies. ~ Adolf Hitler

When I was a kid, the neighbor woman, she'd been a partisan during the war, she told me a story about how their unit was surrounded but they escaped. She had her little baby with her, he was one month old, they were moving along a swamp, and there were Germans everywhere. The baby was crying. He might have given them away, they would have been discovered, the entire unit. And she suffocated him. She talked about this distantly, as if it hadn't been her, and the child wasn't hers. I can't remember now why she told me this. What I remember very clearly is my horror. What had she done? How could she? I thought the whole unit was getting out from the encirclement for that little baby, to save him. Whereas here, in order to save the life of strong healthy men, they choked this child. Then what's the point of life? I didn't want to live after that. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

In Memory of M. B.

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain. ~ Anna Akhmatova

"I'm not going anywhere. I'm joining your little gang of baby heroes on the quest to find Superdad."
Simon and Derek exchanged a look.
"No," Derek said.
"No? Excuse me, it was Rae who betrayed you guys. Not me. I helped Chloe."
"And was it Rae who tormented her at Lyle House?"
"Tormented?" A derisive snort. "I didn't - "
"You did everything you could to get Chloe kicked out," Simon said. "And when that didn't work, you tried to kill her."
"Kill her?" Tori's mouth hardened. "I'm not my mother. Don't you dare accuse - "
"You lured her into the crawl space," Derek said. "Hit her over the head with a brick, bound and gagged her, and locked her in. Did you even check to make sure she was okay? That you hadn't cracked her skull?"
Tori sputtered a protest, but from the horror in her eyes, I knew the possibility hadn't occurred to her.
"Derek," I said, "I don't think - "
"No she didn't think. She could have killed you with the brick, suffocated you with the gag, given you a heart attack from fright, not to mention what would have happened if you hadn't gotten out of your bindings. It only takes a couple of days to die from dehydration."
"I would never have left Chloe to die. You can't accuse me of that."
"No," Derek said. "Just of wanting hr locked up in a mental hospital. And why? Because you didn't like her. Because she talked to a guy you did like. Maybe you're not your mother, Tori. But what you ar ~ Kelley Armstrong

At the time of solitude, I went where Narmada was sleeping. She got awake and sat up. She neither got scared nor nervous but she immediately got off the bed. She kept both her hands tied on her chest. I was standing so close to her that my face was near her face. We could sense each other's breath.

I called out her name and could not speak anything else.

After a moment, I started - "I love you Narmada…I like to be with you…I want to marry you."

She got nervous and said - "Please, go to your room, why have you come here? It may cause trouble if Jaanki sees us like this." She was neck down. Her eyes were on the floor. Her heart was beating fast.

"Don't you want to talk to me? Why are you angry with me? Why don't you trust on my feelings for you?" - I softly asked her.

"I guess you don't like my friendship with Varsha. You and Varsha are poles apart." - I added.

She said - "You please go. It would not be nice if someone sees us like this. I do not want anything from you."

I said - "But I am dying for you and I know you too are made for me."

Her eyes suddenly fell on maid behind the curtains of the door who was trying to listen to our conversation. Narmada said - "You please leave right now, we'll talk later. Mom is not at home."

I went by on her prescriptive tone.

She was fighting for her self-being and the reason was only Varsha. She felt suffocated with my friendshi ~ Laxman Rao

It is better to struggle toward an impossible mission and die in the attempt rather than be suffocated by the fear of trying. ~ Skylar Cross

Just play it cool," Dax says.
He has forced me to don a pair of dark gray slacks and a white button-up shirt. Contrary to his protests, I have pushed the sleeves of the shirt up past my elbows, but I make sure the scars on my arm, which spell out Daphne's name, are covered. I feel overly warm and suffocated in these clothes. "I don't understand. You want me to pretend to be cold?" I fake a shiver. "Like this? What's the point?"
Dax tries to stifle a laugh - not very well - and I realize I've been tripped up by another one of these "figures of speech" that I keep running into. I'm beginning to hate the English language. ~ Bree Despain

She wanted George with some uncorrelated sector of Her Gart, she wanted George to correlate for her, life here, there. She wanted George to define and to make definable a mirage, a reflection of some lost incarnation, a wood maniac, a tree demon, a neuropathic dendrophile ... She wanted George to make the thing an integral, herself integrity. She wanted George to make one of his drastic statements that would dynamite her world away for her. She wanted this, but even as she wanted it she let herself sink further, further, she saw that her two hands reached toward George like the hands of a drowned girl. She knew she was not drowned. Where others would drown-lost, suffocated in this element-she knew that she lived. She had no complete right yet to this element, hands struggled to be pulled out. White hands waved above the water like sea spume or inland-growing pond flowers ... She wanted George to pull her out, she wanted George to push her in, let Her be drowned utterly. ~ H.D.

So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs. ~ H.G.Wells

That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the words tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Too often new ideas are studied and analyzed until they are suffocated. ~ William Pollard

I'll be all over your business. I'd expect to be told where you're going and when, and I'll want to meet your friends." Sam cleared his throat and rolled his shoulders. "Being a couple means holidays and vacations together. It means I can count on you to be supportive when my work gets to be too much, and that you'll always be nice to my mother. That you'll have dinner with me, and we'll go to bed together as often as we can. It means I demand to be a priority, and not an option for when nothing else is going on in your life." He cleared his throat again. "Couples nowadays tend to live separate lives, but that would never fly with me. I've been told I can be overbearing, and I know there's a chance you'll feel suffocated and - ~ Taylor V. Donovan

There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world weary, will weary, and one day he suffocated through his excessive pity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I had a very happy childhood. But I was sent off to boarding school at quite a young age, this massive Victorian house that was suffocated in ivy. I think there is a part of that school in 'Heap House.' ~ Edward Carey

The "mare" in "nightmare" originally referred to a demonic woman who suffocated sleepers by lying on their chests (she was called "Old Hag" in Newfoundland). ~ Oliver Sacks

Zen Buddhism, for example, as practiced by Suzuki, the excellent Japanese mystic, has nothing to do with the superstitious and predjudiced Buddhism that infested Asia for centuries. Sufism, as boasted by the subtle Gurdjeff, totally differs from the Islamism that shouts death to the "infidels." The doctrine of Vivekananda, inspired by his master Ramakrishna, is nothing like the Hinduism that suffocated India for centures of superstious and stupid passivity; the noble mysticism of Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, is nothing like the bloody cultural narrowness and tribal elitism of the mosaic orthodoxy. ~ Marcelo Ramos Motta

She was held for ransom. No one else was to be involved. Gabe paid up but didn't make it in time to release her from a coffin. They didn't keep their word. She suffocated, buried underground. ~ Lacey Silks

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Your words manipulated me, and I fell for it every single time. Your eyes and words were like a snake. I was hypnotized by your lies. You squeezed me to the point that I suffocated, died mentally, came back to life, and was under your spell. Loving you was cruel, but the craziest thing about it all was that my dumb ass somehow felt safe."
~Love is respect ♥~ ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Tunstell was revoltingly bouncy, and Floote had refused to accompany them to Scotland on the grounds that he might be suffocated by an overabundance of bustle. ~ Gail Carriger

I worry about you too," I said softly as I caressed her head resting against my chest. "You look tired."
Lark didn't speak for a minute. When she finally looked at me, I saw a lot of different emotions swirling in those bright green eyes. "I feel like shit. I'm tired and dizzy. I can't eat ninety percent of the food I used to eat. I feel awful, but I'm afraid to complain."
"Why?"
"Maddy just had her baby and she was so tough about the whole thing. I'm surprised she didn't give birth in the middle of the grocery store then go back to picking up things for dinner. Next to her, I'm a weakling. Also, Farah is going to be all brave and awesome too. I don't want to be the whiner."
"First of all, Maddy's got that natural breeder look about her. Some chicks are like that and you can't let the exception be your rule. Besides, you're having twins. You have more baby cooking to do than she did, so screw comparisons."
"I just don't want people to think less of me."
"By people, do you mean Aaron?"
"We barely met and got married and now I'm getting fat and I'm tired all the time. I don't want him to lose interest."
"Oh, Lark, you're so fucking stupid sometimes."
"Yeah, I know," she said, grinning. "We have that in common."
"So true."
"Mom said that I'm like her and she had a guy like Aaron and she suffocated him and he ditched her. I know Mom sucks, but what if she's right and I wear down Aaron and he stops loving me?"
Bijou Hunter

He no longer yearned for his life in the cave. He had experienced that life once and it had proved unlivable. Just as had his other experience - life among human beings. He was suffocated by both worlds. He no longer wanted to live at all. ~ Patrick Suskind

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

China. She will return, standing tall and straight, the milk burned out of her. She will look down on the circle of light we have made in the Pit and she will know that I have kept watch, that I have fought. China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a great waiting silence.
She will know that I am a mother. ~ Jesmyn Ward

I'm not very creative doesn't work. There's no such thing as creative people and non-creative people. There are only people who use their creativity and people who don't. Unused creativity doesn't just disappear. It lives within us until it's expressed, neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear. ~ Brene Brown

She was a goddess personified, her breasts so soft and round he could've buried his head between them, suffocated, and died a happy man. ~ Kristin Miller

Down here in the deep, dark South we know and live with the real world. Candy-Land idealism is quietlly suffocated in the relentless humidity. This is the world where fist meets face. This is where the calluses on a man's hand are bigger than his conscience, and dreams get drowned in sweat and tears. ~ Damien Echols

Kevin tried to sleep with a pillow tight over his face, and he nearly suffocated himself. When he tiptoed over to close the door, they were talking in a subdued tone on the narrow couch. Colette's bare legs were curled up on the pillows, her head riding on the camelback motion of his chest. But her eyes were open, and she looked more adrift than comforted. In a tired baritone, Jerry was talking about prison. It was a horror story -- about the echoing screams of young kids and eyeballs cut open with smuggled razor blades, beginning as the usual speech about the hell he'd seen. But somehow it bcame a lonesome country-western love song, about how every long night of his life he had dreamed of a woman like her-- quick-witted and beautiful and tenacious. It was more than Kevin expected from the man. He told her that if he could buy her safe passage out of this life, hers and Kevin's, he would; but it was hard with a teenage son always pressing to know more and a tiring and insatiable young girlfriend who wanted to devour the world. Think of the pressure on him. "You need to know that we're together like this partly because of you. You keep us up and running. I know it and Kevin knows it. I'm not a good person, Colette -- I never claimed to be, I don't want to be, and you can't expect me to be. But look me in the eye and accept me as a snake, and I'll tell you whatever you're waiting to hear: I need you, I want you, I hurt for you, down in the dust, honey, down in the dust of my bo ~ Peter Craig

One day or one night - between my days and nights, what difference can there be? - I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless - I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me:

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream - nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream.

- Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God ~ Jorge Luis Borges

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

The number of things he thought of saying all at once nearly suffocated him. ~ C.S. Lewis

Sometimes I'd like to stuff all Jews (myself included) into the drawer of a laundry basket. then open it to see if they've suffocated ~ Franz Kafka