Quotes About Instinct

Three meters. I felt a fresh adrenaline dump in my torso, my limbs. His partners must have seen his face. Their shoulders tensed, their heads began to turn. Two meters. The guy to my right was closest. He was turning to his left, toward whatever had made his partner start to bug out. I saw the left side of his face as he came around, everything moving slowly through my adrenalized vision.

What cops call hunches," Trahan said, "FBI hackers call pattern recognition.

In my unpleasant experience, unarmed against a knife, you've basically got four options. Your best bet is to run like hell, if you can. Next best is to do something immediately that prevents the attack from getting started. Third is to create distance so you can deploy a longer-range weapon. Fourth is to go berserk and hope not to get fatally cut going through and over your attacker.

Open your eyes, you idiot, I wanted to say. This woman is a shark. She's from a different world, a different species. There's something way fucking wrong here. Instead: "Harry, my gut tends to be pretty good about these things.

One of the things Livia pounded home with her students was the dictum Trust your gut. When you felt something was off, you had to believe that feeling, even if you couldn't articulate the basis. Gavin de Becker had written a great book on the topic—The Gift of Fear.

Trust your gut. When you felt something was off, you had to believe that feeling, even if you couldn't articulate the basis.

Gavin de Becker had written a great book on the topic—The Gift of Fear.

The second guy moved the gun, trying to track me, the movements overlarge and shaking. Then, maybe because he saw the cool bead I was drawing on him, his nerve broke. He started shooting in a spray-and-pray pattern, his eyes closed, his body hunching forward involuntarily. Pffft. Pffft. Pffft. Small clouds of dust kicked up along the concrete around me, puffing out lazily in my adrenalized slow-motion vision. I heard the sounds of ricochets. Someone screamed.

It's hard for the most primal, powerful regions of the mind to abandon habits that were once crucial to the organism's survival, even when the higher mind recognizes those habits are no longer warranted.

most people are like sheep. Nice, harmless creatures who want nothing more than to be left alone so they can graze. But then of course there are wolves. Who want nothing more than to eat the sheep." He looked at his soup, then back to her. "But there's a third kind of person. The sheepdog. Sheepdogs have fangs like wolves. But their instinct isn't predation. It's protection. All they want, what they live for, is to protect the flock.

I was impressed. I had been taking care not to stand out or to otherwise become memorable, and he had spotted me anyway. He was well attuned to his environment, to the patterns that might at some point make the difference between winning and losing. Or living and dying.

Instinct's the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will.

He had an instinct for mischief in his head, just as some people have a way with numbers or a clear sense of direction.

You can't blame human nature, and there was nothing more human than curiosity.

It would occur to him later that the body knows how to fight when it has to. That it's a secret the body keeps, just as it does the secrets of how to run or jump a creek or throw a fuck or—quite likely—die when there's no other choice. That under conditions of extreme stress it simply takes over and does what needs doing while the brain stands off to one side, unable to do anything but whistle and tap its foot

Human Nature Baby, grab it and growl.

When a spider sucks blood from a fly, he also works hard.

A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to go out and kill something.

A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something.

The female heard every sound, registered every movement, tasted every trail, and saw every sight, for Carcharodon megalodon does not just move through the sea, the sea moves through the Megalodon.

It's my nature. I can't help it.

desire is the killer of reason.

If there is any enlightenment that I have been awakened to, it is that men's minds are dominated by their little aches and pains. We want to think that we are more than that, that we control our lives with our intellect. But now, without civilization clouding the issue, I wonder to what extent intellect is controlled by instinct and culture is the result of raw gut reactions to life.

If there is any enlightenment that I have been awakened to, it is that men's minds are dominated by their little aches and pains. We want to think that we are more than that, that we control our live with intellect. But now, without civilization clouding the issue, I wonder to what extent intellect is controlled by instinct and culture is the result of raw gut reactions to life.