Choking Quotes

I’ve never owned an actual trail-running shoe myself, but maybe I should. My favorite paths are fraught with peril, much of it skulking at shoelace level. A rock, a root, an errant pine cone. Wham, and you’re down, choking in dust and picking pebbles from wounds in your forearms and knees.

The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Bombay, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave.

I love watching Anthony Kim play, but I’m not a fan of the way he grips down a good two inches on his full-swing shots. Choking down lightens the club’s swingweight and effectively makes the shaft stiffer.

Losing streaks are funny. If you lose at the beginning you got off to a bad start. If you lose in the middle of the season, you’re in a slump. If you lose at the end, you’re choking.

A single moment spent in a business meeting or at a pub is more than enough to reveal the basic human truth that we are all faking it most of the time. We congratulate a rival on a triumph when actually we are choking on spite. We are cordial and attentive to crashing bores.

If you must know, my parents came from pretty hardscrabble backgrounds in the southern Midwest. I certainly didn’t grow up poor, but I did spend my 20s and early 30s juggling temp jobs and choking on massive student-loan debt.

The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat – to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in the marketplace.

I think I’ve almost killed myself 1,000 times eating some sandwich as fast as I possibly could and almost choking. It’s a miracle that I’m still alive.

Among the weeds choking out growth and good government are the hundreds of boards, commissions, and advisory committees that have sprouted over the years. They devour time, money, and energy far beyond any real contribution they make.

Be unselfish. That is the first and final commandment for those who would be useful and happy in their usefulness. If you think of yourself only, you cannot develop because you are choking the source of development, which is spiritual expansion through thought for others.

The hardest part was four days after the surgery – my heart rate was very high, I was choking, I couldn’t cough, and I started crying. And it was seeing the way my chest looked, definitely deformed. I’m a fit guy, I’m a skinny guy, but to look in the mirror I was bloated with all of the meds.

I called my party the Green Oxygen party because Colombians were choking.

We must, we must cut the EPA’s legs off. I hate to say that, because it sounds rotten, but they are choking this country to death with legislating through the bureaucracy in Washington.

I’m old enough to chew my peas and corn without choking.

Perhaps it’s because a writer lives in Brooklyn that he’d want to get away from it. It can be very sustaining, this community of writers – sometimes it’s the feeling of many hands giving you a boost. But all that identical ambition can be choking, too. The many hands slide up to your throat.

Sometimes when I’m watching television and something, an image, will come on that has to do with 9/11 or some of these families telling their stories, or children talking about drawing pictures of airplanes flying into towers, you know, I find myself still choking up.

I love watching Anthony Kim play, but I’m not a fan of the way he grips down a good two inches on his full-swing shots. Choking down lightens the club’s swing weight and effectively makes the shaft stiffer. It also makes it difficult to hit the ball high enough for all situations.

I’ve been on so many primetime shows that were cancelled – after one episode, after 10 episodes, after just one season. I got used to that. But I found myself choking up a bit at ‘OLTL.’ It was really hard to say goodbye to those people. It was not the way we wanted to go out.

Once you start choking the space for dissent in a democracy, people feel pushed to the wall and then it leads to further dissent and alienation.

A lot of my comedy is physical, so you don’t have to understand English to get that I’m choking to death on cinnamon or falling out of this tree or whatever.

It was great to get rid of the long hair. It’s such a pain that, if you look at it, it’s always wet when guys wrestle: you dump gallons of conditioner in it to keep it wet so you’re not choking on it. You have all kinds of stuff in it, and just maintaining it is a lot of work.

I didn’t realize it was October until I saw the Chicago Cubs choking.