Quotes about gasp
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Ernest Becker photo

“Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

"The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic ideas", p. 26
The Denial of Death (1973)

Food, Way, Star, Nature

“Out of nowhere I have appeared. They see me for the first time. No longer the image, but reality. They see and they hear me. I raise my arms, and the gasps and babble die down. I begin to speak the words we knew and decided long ago. Each hears me in his own tongue.”

Desmond Leslie (1921–2001) British pilot, film maker, writer, and musician

Source: The Amazing Mr. Lutterworth (1958), p.200

Reality, Appearance, Time
Jeffrey C. Hall photo

“Having said all this, I acknowledge that “I got mine” from the government over the course of many years. Thus, as I say so long,” one component of my last-gasp disquiet stems from pompously worrying about biologists who are starting out or are in mid-career.”

Jeffrey C. Hall (1945) American geneticist and chronobiologist

As quoted in A 2017 Nobel laureate says he left science because he ran out of money and was fed up with academia https://qz.com/1095294/2017-nobel-laureate-jeffrey-hall-left-science-because-he-ran-out-of-funding/ (October 5, 2017) Akshat Rathi, Quartz.