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Reader question: Please explain “take our breath away” in this quote: “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” My comments: Literally, this means that if your life is deprived of special moments of great joy and satisfaction, it probably doesn’t matter whether you live to a ripe old age. He or she who talks like that has a deep understanding of those special moments in life, “moments that take our breath away”, which literally means they make us forget to breathe. Not for long, of course, or we’ll be suffocating. Actually what happens is even though we continue to breathe in and breathe out, we are so fully attracted to a person or event or are utterly engrossed in something or activity, we become unaware of our breaths. For example, beautiful sceneries often do that to us, taking our breath away. Or as poets put it, so engrossed are we that times flies. We forget the time, in other words. Or, plainly put, a whole afternoon may be gone in a jiffy. Anyways, if something takes our breath away, it’s very engaging and shocking and surprising. And when we talk about things in that manner, that they take our breath away, usually we are addressing things that are extremely beautiful and mesmerizing. Indeed, we also say they’re breath-taking. By the way, terrible things are capable of doing that to us, too, if their effect on us is shocking enough. | 
