Quotes about cough

A collection of quotes on the topic of cough, likeness, life, people.

Quotes about cough

Paul McCartney photo
Oscar Wilde photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Nâzım Hikmet photo
Thomas Mann photo
W.B. Yeats photo

“All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

The Scholars http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1682/, st. 2
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

José Saramago photo

“The man changed position, turned his back on the wardrobe blocking the door and let his right arm slide down toward the side on which the dog is lying. A minute later, he was awake. He was thirsty. He turned on his bedside light, got up, shuffled his feet into the slippers which were, as always, providing a pillow for the dog's head, and went into the kitchen. Death followed him. The man filled a glass with water and drank it. At this point, the dog appeared, slaked his thirst in the water-dish next to the back door and then looked up at his master. I suppose you want to go out, said the cellist. He opened the door and waited until the animal came back. A little water remained in his glass. Death looked at it and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed. She would have been equally incapable of imagining it when she'd had to make people die of thirst in the desert, but at the time she hadn't even tried. The dog returned, wagging his tail. Let's go back to sleep, said the man. They went into the bedroom again, the dog turned around twice, then curled up into a ball. The man drew the sheet up to his neck, coughed twice and soon afterward was asleep again. Sitting in her corner, death was watching. Much later, the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto the sofa. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog on her lap.”

Source: Death with Interruptions (2005), p. 172

Naguib Mahfouz photo

“Voices were blended and intermingled in a tumultuous swirl around which eddied laughter, shouts, the squeaking of doors and windows, piano and accordion music, rollicking handclaps, a policeman's bark, braying, grunts, coughs of hashish addicts and screams of drunkards, anonymous calls for help, raps of a stick, and singing by individuals and groups.”

Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) Egyptian writer

Mahfouz (1957) Palace of Desire Part II; Cited in Matt Schudel " Leading Arab Novelist Gave Streets a Voice http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/30/AR2006083000475.html" in: Washington Post, August 31, 2006

Kurt Vonnegut photo
William Goldman photo
Markus Zusak photo
Tom Robbins photo
Lee Child photo
James Patterson photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo

“There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Joy in the Morning (1947)
Source: Jeeves in the Morning

Rick Riordan photo
Jonathan Stroud photo
William Goldman photo
Tom Robbins photo
Dorothy L. Sayers photo

“It is said that love and a cough cannot be hid.”

Source: Gaudy Night

William Goldman photo
Jane Austen photo

“I do not cough for my own amusement.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Robin McKinley photo

“He laughed, tried to make it into a cough, inhaled at exactly the wrong moment, and then really did cough.”

Robin McKinley (1952) American fantasy writer

Source: The Hero and The Crown

P.G. Wodehouse photo
Anne Sexton photo
Tom Robbins photo

“Does koala bear poop smell like cough drops?”

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

Orson Scott Card photo
Ben Croshaw photo
Will Cuppy photo
Artur Schnabel photo

“I know two kinds of audience only – one coughing, and one not coughing.”

Artur Schnabel (1882–1951) Austrian pianist

Source: My Life and Music (1961), p. 202

Jiddu Krishnamurti photo

“Just observe what you are. What you are is the fact: the fact that you are jealous, anxious, envious, brutal, demanding, violent. That is what you are. Look at it, be aware; don’t shape it, don’t guide it, don’t deny it, don’t have opinions about it. By looking at it without condemnation, without judgement, without comparison, you observe; out of that observation, out of that awareness comes affection. Now, go still further. And you can do this in one flash. It can only be done in one flash — not first from the outside and then working further and deeper and deeper and deeper; it does not work that way, it is all done with one sweep, from the outermost to the most inward, to the innermost depth. Out of this, in this, there is attention — attention to the whistle of that train, the noise, the coughing, the way you are jerking your legs about; attention whereby you listen to what is said, you find out what is true and what is false in what is being said, and you do not set up the speaker as an authority. So this attention comes out of this extraordinarily complex existence of contradiction, misery and utter despair. And when the mind is attentive, it can then give focus, which then is quite a different thing; then it can concentrate but that concentration is not the concentration of exclusion. Then the mind can give attention to whatever it is doing, and that attention becomes much more efficient, much more vital, because you are taking everything in.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Vol. XIV, p. 301
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works

Anthony Kiedis photo
Alex Jones photo
Wilfred Owen photo
Richard Harris Barham photo
Vitruvius photo
Ralph Richardson photo

“Acting is merely the art of keeping a large number of people from coughing.”

Ralph Richardson (1902–1983) English actor

Ralph Richardson, reported in Ashton Applewhite; Tripp Evans, Andrew Frothingham (2003). And I Quote: The Definitive Collection of Quotes, Sayings, and Jokes for the Contemporary Speechmaker. Macmillan, p. 283. ISBN 0312307446.

Ben Jonson photo
Dave Barry photo
Ben Croshaw photo
Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
Javad Alizadeh photo

“We all laugh and cough with the same language and will die with the same language as well!”

Javad Alizadeh (1953) cartoonist, journalist and humorist

Quoted in Humor & Caricature (June 1995), p. 3

William Blake photo

“Then old Nobodaddy aloft
Farted and belched and coughed,
And said, "I love hanging and drawing and quartering
Every bit as well as war and slaughtering."”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Let the Brothels of Paris, st. 2
1790s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1791-1792)

Dylan Moran photo

“(after coughing) I have… something. It'll clear up. Might take me with it, but we'll see.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Like, Totally
Other

Dylan Moran photo

“(after coughing) Excuse me. I have a touch of everything.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

What It Is.
Other

Margaret Cho photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo
Harry Turtledove photo
Garth Nix photo

“Flotsam floats when all is sunk.
Jetsam thrown isn't just junk.
Coughs and colds and bright red sores
Waiting for us, so bend yer oars!”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

Source: The Keys to the Kingdom series, Drowned Wednesday (2005), p. 53.

Will Cuppy photo

“[Footnote] The Mexicans gave the Spaniards malaria, and the Spaniards gave the Mexicans smallpox, whooping cough, diphtheria, and syphilis. The Spaniards believed it was better to give than to receive.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part VI: Now We're Getting Somewhere, Montezuma

Robert Graves photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo
Giovanni della Casa photo
Anthony Burgess photo

“Defiling their shadows, infidels, accursed of Allah, with fingernails that are foot-long daggers, with mouths agape like cauldrons full of teeth on the boil, with eyes all fire, shaitans possessed of Iblis, clanking into their wars all linked, like slaves, with iron chains. Murad Bey, the huge, the single-blowed ox-beheader, saw without too much surprise mild-looking pale men dressed in blue, holding guns, drawn up in squares six deep as though in some massed dance depictive of orchard walls. At the corners of the squares were heavy giins and gunners. There did not seem to be many horsemen. Murad said a prayer within, raised his scimitar to heaven and yelled a fierce and holy word. The word was taken up, many thousandfold, and in a kind of gloved thunder the Mamelukes threw themselves on to the infidel right and nearly broke it. But the squares healed themselves at once, and the cavalry of the faithful crashed in three avenging prongs along the fire-spitting avenues between the walls. A great gun uttered earthquake language at them from within a square, and, rearing and cursing the curses of the archangels of Islam on to the uncircumcized, they wheeled and swung towards their protective village of Embabeh. There they encountered certain of the blue-clad infidel horde on the flat roofs of the houses, coughing musket-fire at them. But then disaster sang along their lines from the rear as shell after shell crunched and the Mamelukes roared in panic and burden to the screams of their terrified mounts, to whose ears these noises were new. Their rear dissolving, their retreat cut off, most sought the only way, that of the river. They plunged in, horseless, seeking to swim across to join the inactive horde of Ibrahim, waiting for. action that could now never come. Murad Bey, with such of his horsemen as were left, yelped off inland to Gizeh.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Dylan Moran photo

“(after coughing) …and then you cough and die.”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Monster.
Other

George Herbert photo

“49. Love and a cough cannot be hid.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Bill Hicks photo

“I'll smoke, I'll cough, I'll get the tumors, I'll die, deal? Thank you America. [salutes].”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

Sane Man (1989)

Louis C.K. photo

“Last week I got a flu that I caught, 'cause my daughter coughed … into my mouth.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

Chewed Up

Anaïs Nin photo

“The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me.”

House of Incest (1936)
Context: The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.

Bernard Cornwell photo

“All feared the artillery, coughing its death in fan-like swathes.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Narrator, p. 63
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Sword (1983)
Context: Some feared the cavalry and in their minds they rehearsed the thunder of a thousand hooves, the dust rolling like a sea fog from the charge and shot through with the bright blades that could slice a man's life away or, worse, hook out his eyes and leave him in darkness for life. Others feared musket fire, the lottery of an unaimed bullet coming in the relentless volleys that would fire the dry grass with burning wads and roast the wounded where they fell. All feared the artillery, coughing its death in fan-like swathes. It was best not to think about that.

Samuel Butler (poet) photo

“For rhetoric, he could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope;
And when he happen'd to break off
I' th' middle of his speech, or cough,
H' had hard words,ready to show why,
And tell what rules he did it by;”

Canto I, line 81
Hudibras, Part I (1663–1664)
Context: For rhetoric, he could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope;
And when he happen'd to break off
I' th' middle of his speech, or cough,
H' had hard words, ready to show why,
And tell what rules he did it by;
Else, when with greatest art he spoke,
You'd think he talk'd like other folk,
For all a rhetorician's rules
Teach nothing but to name his tools.

P. D. James photo