"one long wheeze and rattle"

"The world was an ugly place.  It was the ugliness of things that had gone crooked and were now twisted out of all meaning.  It was a deformity that began with houses that had been badly matched to the bodies they held, being too small, or too windy or cracked open to the rain like the careless laying of an egg on sharp rocks.  Then there were the bodies themselves.  In the cruel confinements of their lives they had grown awry.  The very effort of living was a pain.  You could hear it in your bed at night if your ears had been sharpened enough by disgust.  The world was one long wheeze and rattle as it laboured uncertainly in sleep.  Butcher's hands were another living embodiment of this reality.  So too the dead face of Gumboot Dhlamini, the one they had taken on the trains.  It was true of all life.  The only trees in the township, those around the cemetery, had expressed it in their stunted growth, drawing out the full meaning in their misshapen silhouettes seen against the windy sky.  It amounted to the basic horror of existence."

-- Athol Fugard, Tsotsi