Despite what you might guess, when monitoring your breathing, your body doesn't care whether you're inhaling enough oxygen. It cares only whether you're expelling enough carbon dioxide - that's the gas that sets off the panic button when you're suffocating.

Sam Kean

Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.

Alissa Quart

Here's what my CV usually does not say: I was trained as a teacher. My first job lasted less than 60 days. I was an assistant professor at a good college at Delhi University, but I found it very political, very suffocating. At the age of 23, you're not very tolerant of those things.

Amit Bhatia

Whenever I feel like the hustle of Mumbai is suffocating me, I just hop on a plane and jet off to Goa for three to four nights.

Amyra Dastur

Music became less understandable in the wake of the new MTV era. You weren't supposed to be anything other than a pop star, to not go deeper than that. It was really strange. It was suffocating, image-wise. What you could talk about in a song changed; if you were misunderstood, you were really misunderstood - taken literally.

Ann Wilson

I'm a mother myself, and sometimes mothers get a bad rap just because they've tried to do their job. Some people have more of a knack for it than others do, but almost all of it falls to, 'My mother's suffocating me.' Whatever.

Annie Potts

Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.

Armand Assante

Religiosity is suffocating in Pakistan. It invariably stokes the fire in driving society to religious extremism.

Asma Jahangir

The issue for my character, and the issue of the show is, how dirty do your feet have to get without suffocating yourself in the mud in order to get an inch of what you really want done?

Bradley Whitford

For a long time, I was brilliantly achieving drawings that were inert, suffocating and dark. If ever you need illustrations that are inert, suffocating and dark, I know how to do them.

Chris Raschka

Demanding that all of us presume every defendant innocent outside of a courtroom is to demand that we stop evaluating facts, thereby suffocating independent thought and opinion. There is nothing 'reasonable' about that.

Dan Abrams

I spent two years in Palo Alto - what an awful, suffocating place for those of us who don't care about yoga, yogurts and start-ups - and now I have moved to Cambridge, MA - which, in many respects, is like Palo Alto but a bit snarkier.

Evgeny Morozov

When I travel officially... and when I travel on a private basis, I have protection that is less suffocating. But I am protected everywhere.

Francois Hollande

Growing up in the South, I was raised to be a Negro boy. I was acutely aware how other people perceived me, and that informed my behavior. That worked for a period of time, but it could also be suffocating.

George C. Wolfe

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

George Steiner

I've always thought stability was suffocating and deadly. Like, when I read that the kids I went to law school with have stayed at the same firm, I feel like I'm reading an obituary. How much money do you need? Six million, seven million? Put that in the bank and do something else. Get out!

Glenn Greenwald

I started my career in parent education with the idea that we needed to let our kids go. I believed that parents were suffocating for their children. There was no room for individuality and personhood.

Gordon Neufeld

I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

H. G. Wells

The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.

Jane Smiley

Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.

Jane Smiley

For the first five years of Luca's life, I desperately wanted to be a good mother and not to pass on this trauma and darkness that his father and I had experienced, but there's a danger of suffocating your kids, too.

Janine di Giovanni