Quotes about breath
page 9

“If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 5 (22 July 1902)

Life, World, Failure, Parting

“My love,
There's only you in my life
The only thing that's right.
My first love, (yeah)
You're every breath that I take
You're every step I make.”

Lionel Richie (1949) American singer-songwriter, musician, record producer and actor

Endless Love (1981).
Song lyrics

Love, Life

“I'm beginning to feel like a microwaved egg that will explode if anybody so much as breathes onto the surface.”

Douglas Coupland book Shampoo Planet

Shampoo Planet (1992)

Feeling

“Learn to breathe, learn to speak, but first.. learn to feel.”

Joan Crawford (1904–1977) American actress

Interview, Town Hall (1973)

Feeling, Learning

“In a few weeks, or at most a few months, thanks to the skill of the Allied Commanders and the bravery of their men, the objects for which we and they have endured more than four years of sacrifice and suffering have been attained. The lands upon which the enemy had laid his cruel and predatory hand are in course of being evacuated. The exiled peoples are returning in joyous crowds across the war frontiers to their homes. The military power of the enemy is broken. His resources are spent. His armaments are in course of being surrendered. Hope breathes again in the souls of the unhappy peoples whom he has trampled in the mire. The impious spirit that claimed that Might was superior to Right and that there was no law but that of successful violence in the world has been exorcised, let us hope for ever. The conflict for international honour, righteousness, and freedom has been won, and the authors of this vast and wicked conspiracy against the liberties of mankind are fugitives on the face of the earth. My Lords, this is a great hour. It has been a wonderful victory. Are we presumptuous if we see in it the judgment of a Higher Power upon panoplied arrogance and enthroned wrong?”

George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1918/nov/18/the-armistice-address-to-his-majesty in the House of Lords (18 November 1918).

Men, War, People, World

“The days and weeks before a true commitment to Jesus can be terrible and lonely. I think I was feeling bitter about the human experience. I never asked to be human. Nobody can to the womb and explained the situation to me, asking for my permission to go into the world and live and breathe and eat and feel joy and pain. I started thinking about how odd it was to be human, how we are stuck inside this skin, forced to be attracted to the opposite sex, forced to eat food, and use the rest room and then stuck to the earth by gravity. I spent an entire week feeling bitter because I couldn't breathe underwater. I told God I wanted to be a fish. I also felt a little bitter about sleep. Why do we have to sleep? I wanted to be able to stay awake for as long as I wanted, but God had put me in this body that had to sleep. Life no longer seemed like and experience of freedom.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Life, God, Pain, World

“Ugliness in poetry they may find clever and interesting. But it is only beauty that "snatches the breath and fills the eyes with tears."”

Florence Earle Coates (1850–1927) American writer and poet

On poetry

Beauty, Tear

“The oracles are dumb,
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.”

John Milton On the Morning of Christ's Nativity

Hymn, stanza 19, line 173
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (1629)

“There was silence deep as death,
And the boldest held his breath,
For a time.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Battle of the Baltic (1805), st. 2 http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=3042&poem=17248; a poem about the Battle of Copenhagen

Death, Silence, Time

“I'll thank thee when approaching death
Would quench life's feeble ember,
For thou wouldst even renew my breath
With thy sweet word 'Remember!”

Branwell Brontë (1817–1848) British artist

Thorp Green

Life, Death

“The fact that Fred and I were in no way similar - nor were we the best male dancers around never occurred to the public or the journalists who wrote about us…Fred and I got the cream of the publicity and naturally we were compared. And while I personally was proud of the comparison, because there was no-one to touch Fred when it came to "popular" dance, we felt that people, especially film critics at the time, should have made an attempt to differentiate between our two styles. Fred and I both got a bit edgy after our names were mentioned in the same breath. I was the Marlon Brando of dancers, and he the Cary Grant. My approach was completely different from his, and we wanted the world to realise this, and not lump us together like peas in a pod. If there was any resentment on our behalf, it certainly wasn't with each other, but with people who talked about two highly individual dancers as if they were one person. For a start, the sort of wardrobe I wore - blue jeans, sweatshirt, sneakers - Fred wouldn't have been caught dead in. Fred always looked immaculate in rehearsals, I was always in an old shirt. Fred's steps were small, neat, graceful and intimate - mine were ballet-oriented and very athletic. The two of us couldn't have been more different, yet the public insisted on thinking of us as rivals…I persuaded him to put on his dancing shoes again, and replace me in Easter Parade after I'd broken my ankle. If we'd been rivals, I certainly wouldn't have encouraged him to make a comeback.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Gene Kelly interviewed in Hirschhorn, Clive. Gene Kelly, A Biography. W.H Allen, London, 1984. p. 117. ISBN 0491031823.

People, World, Shoe, Way

“The light
Begin to bleed,
Begin to breathe,
Begin to speak.
D'you know what?
I love you better now.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Hounds of Love (1985), The Ninth Wave

Love, Light

“A tongue like yours should be burned and branded
So I can see you lie to me
I wish the air would color red when you breathed it
Oh, so I could've seen it coming
Look in my eyes when you say you love me
So I can see you lie to me”

Sara Bareilles (1979) American pop rock singer-songwriter and pianist

"Lie to Me"
Lyrics, Once Upon Another Time (2012)

Love, Lie, Color

“Just so,' agreed the King. 'So accept the escort, Adjunct, or I shall hold my breath until I achieve a most royal shade of purple.”

Steven Erikson book Dust of Dreams

Dust of Dreams (2009)

“The Southern school superintendent is a kind of remote deity who breathes the purer air of Mount Parnassus. The teachers see him only on those august occasions when they need to be reminded of the nobility of their calling. The powers of a superintendent are considerable. He hires and fires, manipulates the board of education, handles a staggering amount of money, and maintains the precarious existence of the status quo.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Source: The Water is Wide (1972), p. 11

Money, Education, School, Teachers

“The DeBeers people are almost saying what they really mean. You remember the old DeBeers slogan, "Diamonds are forever." Then they changed it to "This year, take her breath away." The new slogan is "Diamonds. Render her speechless." Why don't they just come out and say it: "Diamonds. That'll shut her up."”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

They Call Me Tater Salad

People, Change

“Raise your half-buried countenance from the sudden shower of dust, Parthenope, and place your locks, singed by the mountains breath, on the tomb and body of your great foster son.”
Exsere semirutos subito de pulvere vultus, Parthenope, crinemque adflato monte sepultum pone super tumulos et magni funus alumni.

Statius Silvae

iii, line 104
Silvae, Book V

Mountain, Singing

“God told him to bring two of every sort, not two of every species, no, two of every sort. He said, bring them after his kind, after their kind, after his kind. The Bible is real clear on that topic. You bring all the kinds, not every species. You only have to bring those the whose nostrils have the breath of life, of those on dry land. Noah did not have to bring any fish on the ark. They had plenty of water outside. He also did not have to bring any bugs on the Ark, because bugs do not have nostrils. Bugs breathe through their skin, through spiracles. Insects were not required to be on the Ark. Insects can survive a flood just fine. Go any place where there has been a flood, after the water goes down. Walk out into the mud and tell me the first thing that you notice. Bugs by the millions and millions, right? Insects did not have to go on the ark. Some of them might have been on there but they did not have to be.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Dinosaurs and the Bible

Life, God, Fish, Water

“There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Resignation

Resignation, st. 5.

Life, Death

“You will find that for a smoking flax there is no specific like heaven's oxygen; for a faint and flickering piety there is no cure comparable to the one without which all our own exertions are but an effort to light a lamp in a vacuum — the breath of the Holy Spirit.”

James Hamilton (1814–1867) Scottish minister and a prolific author of religious tracts

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 321.

Effort, Light

“By now the ghosts have gone to bed
Exhaling the last breath of a revolution
Cycling on to the next existence
In the Elemental Evolution”

D. S. Bradford (1982) musician

Elemental Evolution, https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/D-S-Bradford/Elemental-Evolution, chorus <br class="br">Elemental Evolution (2016)

“He bent above: so still her breath
What air she breathed he could not say,
Whether in worlds of life or death:
So softly ebbed away, away
The life that had been light to him,
So fled her beauty leaving dim
The emptying chambers of his heart
Thrilled only by the pang and smart,
The dull and throbbing agony
That suffers still, yet knows not why.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

Life, Death, World, Beauty

“Overhead the swallows dipped down to catch bugs rising from the ground. Then they soared back up beyond the barracks. Hannah watched them for a moment, scarcely breathing. It was as if all nature ignored what went on in the camp. There were brilliant sunsets and soft breezes. Around the commandant’s house, bright flowers were teased by the wind. Once she’d seen a fox cross the meadow to disappear into the forest.”

Jane Yolen book The Devil's Arithmetic

Source: The Devil's Arithmetic (1988), p. 154

Flowers, Nature, Housing

“Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated.”

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 16 (p. 215)

“It is in the world of words, amid the dull but perhaps necessary detail of every-day events—that quotations come with a warmth and a welcome upon memory, and like Milton's fish, "Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold." …In the dry and laboring essay, amid the windings of many words and the accumulation of antecedents, we hail their sudden and familiar appearances as patches of Nature's green to repose on by the way; their "dulcet and harmonious breath" animates a train of associations that dwell in the most sylvan haunts of emotion and sentiment; to their fountains of "loosened silver" we turn for a refreshing and a pleasant abstraction.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"Quotations".
Sketches from Life (1846)

World, Way, Nature, Fish

“Consciousness, thoughts, are traveling through space in your head; we are traveling through space on this beautiful biosphere, Earth. If consciousness can traverse inner space, then perhaps it can traverse outer space. Perhaps we are as connected by consciousness as we are by the air that we all breathe. The air we inhale through the holes in our faces which tumbles into our lungs and blood, which travels through our hearts, which forms the words we speak, the air which we exhale, which is connected to all air, an unbroken entity, like all the water in all the rivers in the world, leading to the sea, touching one another.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

World, Beauty, Travel, Water

“Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey's over
There'll be time enough to sleep.”

A.E. Housman book A Shropshire Lad

No. 4 ("Reveille"), st. 6.
A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Sleep, Time

“In my past there is Krishna. In my dreams I dream of recreating a huge college of flutists, a veritable Vrindaban in which students will arrive to learn and study with satchels full of flutes, live in mud huts, eat at a common langar. A modern Vrindaban from which a thousand flutes will ring out each day. For what else is there? When my breath is gone and I can not play anymore what do I leave behind? Some dedicated students! When you leave nothing behind, you cry at the point of death, but I still dream, I dare to dream that through my students my flute will be left behind as the memory of Krishna.”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

In "Discography".

Death, Dreams, Study, Learning

“The temperature was six below zero and it kept me dying on the spot because the blood coagulated and clotted in ugly smears of cloth and skin and the pain hadn't started yet, so when the little fat guy who saw my eyes open and still bright pulled me away from the carnage he was almost in the shock I was going into. Nobody would listen to him. He was a drunk. I was nearly dead.
Sometimes the body responds to a stimulus that can't be explained. He got me upright. I walked woodenly, dyingly. I was sat in an old car. The fat man rolled down the windows. The blood stayed frozen. My hands were numb and I couldn't feel my feet. Idly, I wondered what frostbite was like. Breathing was a thing that was happening, but at a pace that said it could slow, then stop at any time. A dull, squeezing sensation of pain was beginning to gnaw on my insides and I knew that eventually, and very soon, it would grow into a terrible, devastating animal with an awful hunger and I would be eaten alive by it.
I wanted to scream but nothing would come out.”

Mickey Spillane book Black Alley

Black Alley (1996)

Hunger, Pain, Cars, Guy

“So much for that line of reasoning, Lord Richars," Ekaterin finished. She sat back with a hand-dusting gesture, and added, by no means under her breath, "Twit'.'”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)

“But a man's life breath cannot come back again—
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man's clenched teeth.”

Homér Iliad

IX. 408–409 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

Life

“You can't make a sculpture, in my opinion, without involving your body. You move and you feel and you breathe and you touch. The spectator is the same. His body is involved too. If it's a sculpture he has to first of all sense gravity. He's got two feet. Then he must walk and move and use his eyes and this is a great involvement. Then if a form goes in like that – what are those holes for? One is physically involved and this is sculpture. It's not architecture. It's rhythm and dance and everything. It's do with swimming and movement and air and sea and all our well-being. Sculpture is involved in the body living in the spirit or the spirit living in the body, whichever way you like to put it.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Art Talk, conversations with 15 woman artists', (1975), p. 21

Way, Feeling, Sense, Dance

“I think and speak clearer since I cut the dairy out. I can breathe better and perform at a better rate, and my voice is clearer. I can explore different things with my voice that I couldn’t do because of my meat and dairy ingestion. I am proud and blessed to be a vegetarian, everything became clear.”

Common (rapper) (1972) American rapper, actor and author from Illinois

From the documentary Holistic Wellness for the Hip-Hop Generation (2003); as quoted in "Common, Sticman, Badu Featured In New Health Documentary" https://allhiphop.com/2003/08/13/common-sticman-badu-featured-in-new-health-documentary/, AllHipHop (13 August 2003). <br class="br">Interviews

Thinking

“I held my breath, for to me there is nothing more awe-inspiring than when a man discovers to you the nakedness of his soul.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

"The pool", p. 140
Short Stories, Collected short stories 1

Soul

“It was in His parting sorrow — that Jesus asked His disciples to remember Him; and never was entreaty of affection answered so; for ever since has His name been breathed in morning and evening prayers that none can count, and has brought down some gift of sanctity and peace on the anguish of bereavement, and the remorse of sin.”

James Martineau (1805–1900) English religious philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 70.

Peace, Parting

“My bark is wafted to the strand
By breath Divine;
And on the helm there rests a hand
Other than mine.”

Henry Alford (1810–1871) English churchman, theologian, textual critic, scholar, poet, hymnodist, and writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 280.

“He who has ever been confronted with the ultimate and has realized that sun and stars and souls do not ramble in a vacuum will keep his heart in readiness for the hour when the world is entranced, awaits a soul to breathe in the mystery that all things exhale in their craving for salvation. For things are not mute. The stillness is full of demands. Out of the world comes a behest to instill into the air a rapturous song for God, to incarnate in the stones a message of humble beauty, and to instill a prayer for goodness in the hearts of all children.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

"The Holy Dimension", p. 330
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

God, Children, World, Beauty

“To make our story shorter than the miniature groom's, he learnt that his own property in himself was in danger; and that, if the patriot’s definition of liberty be true —"it is like the air we breathe, without it we die"—his life was near its termination. A writ was issued against him; and, thanks to a douceur to his valet, two professional gentlemen, as he left his toilet, would deprive his friends at the Clarendon of his company.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Life

“I have grown weary of the winds of heaven.
I will not be a reed to hold the sound
Of whatsoever breath the gods may blow,
Turning my torment into music for them.
They gave me life; the gift was bountiful,
I lived with the swift singing strength of fire,
Seeking for beauty as a flame for fuel —
Beauty in all things and in every hour.
The gods have given life — I gave them song;
The debt is paid and now I turn to go.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Sappho (Rivers to the Sea)"
Rivers to the Sea (1915)

Life, God, Beauty, Music

“How many powerful memories are triggered by smell and taste? Your mother’s old perfume, the smell your father’s breath, the taste of the soap they’d make you eat.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Memory

“The method for practicing this ardent love is short and easy. Its subject is constant and loving aspiration. But to be perfect, aspiration must be practice so eagerly and continually that it becomes as easy as breathing. It has a number of degrees, all of which can be reduced to four. The first consists in offering oneself and all created things to God. As far as possible, this should be done in an abstract manner. The second degree consists in making requests of the divine Spouse, asking him for his gifts in him and for his own sake. The third degree consists in being resigned and completely conformed to him. This conformity is very lofty and perfect, and is characterized by a great love. Moreover, the soul also desires it for creatures who are capable of such exalted love. The fourth degree is that of unitive love which unites the soul to God. Here the souls yearns for him and pursues him with acts of love until he opens his loving and super essential bosom to it. Here it feast upon his immense beauty in great abundance and intoxication, eating and drinking at the table of the Blessed. But since this does not last very long, the soul soon returns to itself to feed upon its former spiritual fare. From this it derives renewed strength, until God again receives it into his bosom with the same effect.”

John of St. Samson (1571–1636)

From Prayer, Aspiration, and Contemplation

Love, God, Beauty, Soul

“It is as though we had buried Someone we thought dead, and now hear him calling in the night: Help me! Heaving and panting, he raises the gravestone of our soul and body higher and still higher, breathing more freely at every moment.
Every word, every deed, every thought is the heavy gravestone he is forever trying to lift. And my own body and all the visible world, all heaven and earth, are the gravestone which God is struggling to heave upward.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

God, World, Soul, Help

“Her suffering ended with the day,
Yet lived she at its close,
And breathed the long, long night away
In statue-like repose.But when the sun in all his state
Illumed the eastern skies,
She passed through Glory's morning-gate,
And walked in Paradise.”

James Aldrich (1810–1856) American editor and minor poet

A Death-Bed, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: Thomas Hood, The Death Bed, p. 591; Phoebe Cary, The Wife, p. 171.

Suffering, Sun, Night

“A dumb halo of sorrow lurks in Shirin's cold gaze,
Reclining on the marble columns of the veranda,
A pregnant cat is sleeping on her lap
And slowly snores.

The Shirin's image north of the garden
Is hanging on an apple tree;
Khosrow, in love with another mistress, mockingly mutters;
How can the eye in this image
Show the trace of lover breathing eye of Shirin?…??
For a moment Khosrow beats at the bow and says:
Shirin's eye is a good target, I have ordained
That this new bow should be tried on it.

Khosrow, the king of the world,
The master of archers,
Pulled out an arrow from his quiver.
This Parthian arrow, this nimble flying hawk,
Is familiar with the bow and the thumb.

A spark rose from Mount Bistoun,
Was it the lightening from Farhad's ax?
An angry flame is blazing in the image's eye,
The loud uproar,
The loud clamor of Farhad's heart,
Is robing sleep from the cat's eye.”

Farrokh Tamimi (1934–2003) Iranian poet and translator

Poet, Farhad

Love, World, Cats, Lovers

“There are moments when my mind misses a beat. I find myself, in mid-step or mid-breath, feeling as if delivered abruptly into my body after a long absence (spent where, I could not say), or a long, dreamless sleep. I lose not my memory, merely my thread. My attention has inexplicably wandered, but a little calm introspection restores my context and brings me peace. Almost peace.”

Greg Egan (1961) Australian science fiction writer and former computer programmer

Mind Vampires http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/HORROR/VAMPIRES/Vampires.html, published in Interzone (Winter 1986) <br class="br">Fiction

Peace, Feeling, Sleep, Memory

“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at 4 o'clock in the morning.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-1995)

Books, World, Feeling, Drink

“She turned again, and this time she was closer. Her head nestled against my shoulder and she moved my hand up her body until I knew there was no marvel of engineering connected to the bra because there was no bra. And the studded belt she wore was the keystone to the whole ensemble, and when it was unsnapped the whole affair came apart in a whisper of black satin that folded back against the sand until all of her reflected the moonlight from above until I eclipsed the pale brilliance, and there was no sound except that of the waves and our breathing. Then soon even the waves were gone, and there was only the warmth of white skin and little muscles that played under my hand and the fragrance that was her mouth. The redhead had been right.”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

My Gun is Quick (1950)

Time

“Harry Dresden: Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of a entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that seems tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.
But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people. That was me on the staircase to Chicago-Over-Chicago. Yes, I was standing on nothing but congealed starlight. Yes, I was walking up through a savage storm, the wind threatening to tear me off and throw me into the freezing waters of lake Michigan far below. Yes, I was using a legendary and enchanted means of travel to transcend the border between one dimension and the next, and on my way to an epic struggle between ancient and elemental forces. But all I could think to say, between panting breaths, was, "Yeah. Sure. They couldn't possibly have made this an escalator."”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

The Dresden Files, Summer Knight (2002)

People, Way, Travel, History

“We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

The Last Page, p. 7.
A History of Reading (1996)

Understanding, Reading

“The spirit of true religion breathes gentleness and affability; it gives a native, unaffected ease to the behavior; it is social, kind, cheerful; far removed from the cloudy and illiberal disposition which clouds the brow, sharpens the temper, and dejects the spirit.”

Hugh Blair (1718–1800) British philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 501.

Religion, Behavior

“I had felt sick before and had been saved by Sekt. Now I was beginning to feel sick of the Sekt. I would, I knew, shortly have to vomit…. I started gently to move towards one of the open windows. The aims of the artistic policy enunciated by the National Chamber of Film might, said Goebbels, be expressed under seven headings. Oh Christ. First, the articulation of the sense of racial pride, which might, without reprehensible arrogance, be construed as a just sense of racial superiority. Just, I thought, moving towards the breath of the autumn dark, like the Jews, just like the. This signified, Goebbels went on, not narrow German chauvinism but a pride in being of the great original Aryan race, once master of the heartland and to be so again. The Aryan destiny was enshrined in the immemorial Aryan myths, preserved without doubt in their purest form in the ancient tongue of the heartland. Second. But at this point I had made the open window. With relief the Sekt that seethed within me bore itself mouthward on waves of reverse peristalsis. Below me a great flag with a swastika on flapped gently in the night breeze of autumn. It did not now lift my heart; it was not my heart that was lifting. I gave it, with gargoyling mouth, a litre or so of undigested Sekt. And then some strings of spittle. It was not, perhaps, as good as pissing on the flag, but, in retrospect, it takes on a mild quality of emblematic defiance…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

Feeling, Autumn, Sense, Heart

“I hear my father-in-law's response…"Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!"”

David Mitchell book Cloud Atlas

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?
The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, Monday, 13th January —, p. 528-529.
Cloud Atlas (2004)

Life, Pain, World, Family

“Sit and be still
until in the time
of no rain you hear
beneath the dry wind's
commotion in the trees
the sound of flowing
water among the rocks,
a stream unheard before,
and you are where
breathing is prayer.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Given (2005), Sabbaths 2001

Tree, Water, Time

“Tradition is not, as post-modernists maintain, a library or museum the artist plunders. It is the endless conversation between the living and the dead. Young artists enter into this conversation passionately — not merely intellectually, though study and analysis play a part. They live and breathe it. Tradition is not a public building. It is a love affair.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

Love, Study, Passion, Parting

“The sidaïques, by breathing the virus through all their pores, put into question the equilibrium of the nation… The sidaïque is contagious by his sweat, his saliva, his contact. It's a kind of leper.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen (1928) French right-wing and nationalist politician

Statement on the TV station Antenne 2 (6 May 1987)

Question

“A sweeter woman ne'er drew breath
Than my sonne's wife, Elizabeth.”

Jean Ingelow (1820–1897) British writer

"The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire", reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman.”

Samuel R. Delany book The Einstein Intersection

Section 12
The Einstein Intersection (1967)

“See the wretch that long has tost
On the thorny bed of pain,
At length repair his vigour lost,
And breathe and walk again:
The meanest floweret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening paradise.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

Source: Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=oopv (1754), Line 41

Pain, Sun

“What I am really here to talk about is the central thing, the core, the nucleus—life itself. I’m not here to talk about what we should do in life. There are many options as far that is concerned and, of course, you can pick one, whatever suits you. But I’m talking about life itself without which nothing is wrong and nothing is right. Unbiased life. Maybe one day everything is going the right way for you and you’re incredibly happy. And you’re still breathing and you’re still alive. Then one day you’re really sad, and everything is terrible. And you’re still breathing; you’re still alive. That thing is never affected by what the outer circumstances are.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia April 3, 1984
1980s

Life, Happiness, Sadness, Way

“When you feel anger arising, remember to return to your breathing and follow it. The other person may see that you are practicing, and she may even apologize.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Teachings on Love (2005) Full Circle Publishing ISBN 81-7621-167-2

Feeling, Personality, Anger

“How difficult, how extremely difficult for the soul to sever itself from its body the world: from mountains, seas, cities, people. The soul is an octopus and these are its tentacles. … No force anywhere on earth is as imperialistic as the human soul. It occupies and is occupied in turn, but it always considers its empire too narrow. Suffocating, it desires to conquer the world in order to breathe freely.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Report to Greco

"My Friend The Poet. Mount Athos.", Ch. 19, p. 188
Report to Greco (1965)

People, World, Soul, Mountain

“By dancing we could remain in the moment. By dancing we could avoid talking, dwelling on the past, or thinking about the future. We were connected in a way that was neither threatening nor complicated; just circling and swaying, following the oldest rhythms of breath and heartbeat.”

Valya Dudycz Lupescu (1974) American writer

The Silence of Trees (2010)

Way, Thinking, Past, Future

“There's nothing wrong with the word conspiracy. It just means 'to breathe together'.”

Janeane Garofalo (1964) comedian, actress, political activist, writer

Majority Report, November 10, 2004 broadcast
Majority Report

“Lang kept at it until everyone had had a turn shooting an AK-47. Then he said, "This weapon can do one other thing I haven't shown you yet. When you move the change lever all the way down instead of to the middle position, this is what happens." He stuck a fresh clip in the repeater, turned toward the target circle, and blasted away. He went through the whole magazine almost before Caudell could draw in a startled breath. "Good God almighty," Rufus Daniel said, peering in awe at the brass cartridge cases scattered around Lang's feet. "Why didn't he show us that in the first place?" He was not the only one to raise the question; quite a few shouted it. Caudell kept quiet. By now, he was willing to assume Lang knew what he was doing. The weapons instructor stayed perfectly possessed. He said, "I didn't show you that earlier because it wastes ammunition and because the weapon accurate past a few meters- yards- on full automatic. You can only carry so many rounds. If you shoot them all off in the first five minutes of battle, what will you do once they're gone? Think hard on that, gentlemen, and drill it into your private soldiers. This weapon requires fire discipline- requires it, I say again."”

Harry Turtledove book The Guns of the South

Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 31

God, Way, Question, Thinking

“"Global Warming" represents the last gasp of so-called "scientific progressivism", a mass of pitifully transparent falsehoods being employed to justify reducing mankind under the absolute despotism of "experts", the obvious implication being that we can’t even breathe responsibly. Environmentalism, Gaianism, is a religion on the basis of which — illegally under the First Amendment — public policy is being generated. Exhaling carbon dioxide is Original Sin, a reliable source of unlimited power and wealth to a Parasitic Class of politicians, bureaucrats, and cops with which our civilization now finds itself infested.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Wanna Buy a Future?"

Religion, Wealth

“Oh, love is timid in its birth!
Watching her lightest look or stir,
As he but look'd and breathed with her.
Gay words were passing, but he leant
In silence; yet, one quick glance sent,—
His secret is no more his own,
When has woman her power not known?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto II
The Troubadour (1825)

Love, Secret, Birth, Silence

“I'm angry that I can't sleep that I hate myself
that I can’t write as well as I want
because I’m so damn angry I can’t breathe
Furious that nobody else seems to be angry
and they don’t want me to be either
Enraged at this whole sodden rotting mess they keep calling
civilization
as it poisons the air and the water and kills everyone in it’s way.”

Chrystos (1946) American writer, activist

"They're always telling me I'm too angry" (1995)

Hate, Way, Sleep, Water

“I hibernate through the winter and wait for the summer madness
Stout on my breath and a bad case of desert mouth.”

Jehst (1979) British rapper

1979
The Return of the Drifter EP (2002)

Winter, Waiting, Summer, Madness

“A sudden splendour seemed to kindle day
A breeze came breathing in a sweet perfume
Blown from eternal gardens, filled the room.”

Thomas Parnell (1679–1718) Anglo-Irish cleric, writer and poet.

from the poem Piety, or the Vision.

“The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.”

Paul Muldoon (1951) Irish poet

Princeton University Library Chronicle, Spring 1998.

“Never stop to breathe the pretty flower scents. The graves of the poor still stink.”

Lindsey Davis book The Accusers

The Accusers

Flowers

“The fifth act of the great drama in Flanders opened on the 22nd October. Enormous masses of ammunition, such as the human mind had never imagined before the war, were hurled upon the bodies of men who passed a miserable existence scattered about in mud-filled shell-holes. The horror of the shell-hole area of Verdun was surpassed. It was no longer life at all. It was mere unspeakable suffering. And through this world of mud the attackers dragged themselves, slowly, but steadily, and in dense masses. Caught in the advanced zone by our hail of fire they often collapsed, and the lonely man in the shell-hole breathed again. Then the mass came on again. Rifle and machine-gun jammed with the mud. Man fought against man, and only too often the mass was successful.”

Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937) German Army officer and later Nazi leader in Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch

"My War Memories, 1914-1918" - by Erich Ludendorff - 1919

Life, Men, War, World

“It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him. The wire was about pain too: it would always be there, jutting into his feet, the weight of the bar, the dryness of the throat, the throb of his arms, but the joy was losing the pain so that it no longer mattered. So too with his breathing. He wanted his breath to enter the wire so that he was nothing. This sense of losing himself. Every nerve. Every cuticle. He hit it on the towers. The logic became unfixed. It was the point where there was no time. The wind was blowing and his body could have experienced it years in advance.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), The Ringing Grooves of Change

Pain, Sex, Sense, Time

“The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

"My Papa's Waltz," ll. 1-4
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Death, Boy

“Spare your breath to cool your porridge.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 5.

“Tis something, if in absence we can see
The footsteps of the past: it soothes the heart
To breathe the air scented in other years
By lips beloved; to wander through the groves
Where once we were not lonely”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Guerilla Chief
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Past, Heart

“How should I avoid to be her slave,
Whose subtle art invisibly can wreath
My fetters of the very air I breath?”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

The Fair Singer.

Art

“I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“For some people the revelation comes too late that life is best kept to the essentials. Some people are given their last rites and that person might say in their last breath, "I should have celebrated Festivus."”

Jerry Stiller (1927) American comedian

Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us (2005)

Life, People, Personality

“If I fall along the way, pick me up and dust me off; If I get too tired to make it, be my breath so I can walk; If I need some other love then, give me more than I can stand; When my smile gets old and faded, just wait around I'll smile again; It shouldn't be so complicated, just hold me and then, just hold me again”

Rob Thomas (1972) American singer

Love, Smile, Way, Waiting

“How many wicked intentions climb aboard a pure and innocent phrase, after it is already on its way! It is enough to make one suspect that lying is, many a time, as involuntary as breathing.”

Machado de Assis book Dom Casmurro

Quantas intenções viciosas há assim que embarcam, a meio caminho, numa frase inocente e pura! Chega a fazer suspeitar que a mentira é muita vez tão involuntária como a transpiração.
Source: Dom Casmurro (1899), Ch. 41, p. 100.

Way, Lying, Time

“In the Book of Hermes, "Pimander," is enunciated in distinct and unequivocal sentences, the whole trinitarian dogma accepted by the Christians. "The light is me," says Pimander, the DIVINE THOUGHT. "I am the nous or intelligence, and I am thy god, and I am far older than the human principle which escapes from the shadow. I am the germ of thought, the resplendent WORD, the SON of GOD. Think that what thus sees and hears in thee, is the Verbum of the Master, it is the Thought, which is God the Father… The celestial ocean, the AETHER, which flows from east to west, is the Breath of the Father, the life-giving Principle, the HOLY GHOST!"”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

For they are not at all separated and their union is LIFE.
Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter I

Life, God, Books, Intelligence

“The pleasure of talking is the inextinguishable passion of a woman, coeval with the act of breathing.”

Alain-René Lesage book Gil Blas

Book VII, ch. 7.
Gil Blas (1715-1735)

Pleasure, Passion

“Doctor Doom: Bereft of my technology… mystic armor damaged… offensive and defensive capabilities minimal. Enemy forces… [a horde of demons closes in] substantial. It matters not. Even cornered, to my last breath I remain who and what I am. I will not hide, nor tremble, nor beg. Let them come and reckon with fury that is DOOM defiant. Here I stand, hell-horde! Unbowed! But understand: If it is my destiny that I should perish this day, I shall not go down easily… and I shall NOT go down ALONE.
Demons: RIP its SKIN. Wear it for HIDE. Its EYES for me. Tear its FLESH from its BONES.
Doctor Doom: Yes, come, and let us make an end of it — there is DOOM enough for ALL!”

J. Michael Straczynski (1954) American writer and television producer

June
2006
J. Michael Straczynski
The Hammer Falls (Part 2)
Fantastic Four
537

Hell, Understanding, Tear

“Where there's no stop and go
a thought may wet your face,
a breath arrest your stare.”

Nathaniel Tarn (1928) American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator

Poem Markings published in: Nathaniel Tarn (1968) Where Babylon ends.

“When first thy pencil did these beaties give
And breathing figures learnt from thee to live”

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) American poet

To A young African painter from Poems on Various Subjects kindle ebook ASIN B0083ZJ7SU

“And uncontrollable laughter broke from the happy gods
as they watched the god of fire breathing hard
and bustling through the halls.”

Homér Iliad

I. 599–600 (tr. Robert Fagles); hence the expression "Homeric laughter".
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

God, Happiness, Laughter

“I've stopped smoking… I think the cost was a lot of it, and not being able to breathe. I first gave up smoking when I was eight.”

Dave Allen (1936–2005) Irish comedian and satirist

Compilation by the BBC 11 March, 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4340205.stm

Thinking

“Lao Chiu's burns were so extensive that, with the exception of his scalp, two shoulders, the waist where his leather belt was worn and the soles of his feet, pratically his whole body was affected. His back and hips were burned deeply and his right leg was even worse. Every time it was necessary to turn him over and change his dressings ten doctors and five nurses were required and the process took several hours. Moreover, the patient suffered very much and was short of breath for a long while.”

Ba Jin (1904–2005) Chinese novelist

A Battle For Life (July 1958)

Suffering, Change, Time

“As we all know, the singularity in the art of Bach is the fusion of both levels and lines, the horizontal and vertical line. It’s a real wonder to see that the creation and forming of the horizontal line, the polyphonic structure, also results in this perfect, beautiful vertical line, the harmonic line. As we also know, Bach already used the full harmonic range and radius as no composer before him. My artistic aim of course is to point out the horizontal line in soloistic manner in a dynamically elastic way, but in the same breath to form the harmonic line in a bright field of color (I would call it “harmonic articulation”), to achieve a particular atmosphere of emotions and moods, drama, velocity, vividness, and so on. As we can imagine, these are high demands …”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Beauty, Art, Color, Way

“Hush your highness, don't you breathe
No, baby, hold me in your arms, I'm shivering
But what's all this for?
If I was the battle, baby, you have won the war”

Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist

"Hold Onto Me"
Song lyrics, America's Sweetheart (2004)

War, Baby

“In all cultures, it is the task of a religion to close the field of contingency …and to set up havens of the absolute where it is possible to be led from acting to listening, from having to being, from planning to hoping, from judging to forgiving — from the finite into the infinite. A society in which such open spaces of eternity do not exist or are only insufficiently developed dies of itself due to lack of air to breathe.”

Eugen Drewermann (1940) German psychologist and theologian

Quoted in Matthias Beier, A Violent God-Image. An Introduction to the Work of Eugen Drewermann, p. 276 (2004)

Religion, Hope, Forgiveness

“Great Carthage low in ashes cold doth lie,
Her ruins poor the herbs in height scant pass,
So cities fall, so perish kingdoms high,
Their pride and pomp lies hid in sand and grass:
Then why should mortal man repine to die,
Whose life, is air; breath, wind; and body, glass?”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Giace l'alta Cartago; appena i segni
Dell'alte sue ruine il lido serba.
Muojono le città, muojono i regni;
Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba;
E l'uomo d'esser mortal par che si sdegni:
O nostra mente cupida e superba!
Canto XV, stanza 20 (tr. Fairfax)
Max Wickert's translation:
: Exalted Carthage lies full low. The signs
of her great ruin fade upon the strand.
So dies each city, so each realm declines,
its pomp and glory lost in scrub and sand,
and mortal man to see it sighs and pines.
(Ah, greed and pride! when will you understand?)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)