Quotes About Survival

The boy who had survived by blending into the background had to accept that he would now be thrust into the foreground, into the unrelenting eye of the world.

the desert, nobody needed to preach that there was a higher power than the human. Whether you think of it as natural or supernatural—and in the sixth century there was no difference between the two—anyone unaware of it did not survive.

How could you teach someone to survive? You pointed them in the right direction and hoped they'd swim, not sink. Waving, not drowning. There are more important things in life than individual happiness. It was an easy trap to fall into, mistaking a lack of self-direction for an expression of love.

I didn't regret the decision to take hormones. I wouldn't have survived much longer without passing. And the surgery was a gift to myself, a coming home to my body. But I wanted more than to just barely exist, a stranger always trying not to get involved. I wanted to find out who I was, to define myself. Whoever I was, I wanted to deal with it, I wanted to live it again. I wanted to be able to explain my life, how the world looked from behind my eyes.

Whatever we did see and endure in those stairs, we were the lucky ones. For some, there were no stairs and no exit at all.

He inhabited a gray winter fog on a distant elk mountain where hunters are lost indefinitely and their own bones mark the boundaries.

Old stories and new stories are essential: They tell us who we are, and they enable us to survive. We thank all the ancestors, and we thank all those people who keep on telling stories generation after generation, because if you don't have the stories, you don't have anything.

I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have the stories.

He had been thinking about how easy it was to stay alive now that he didn't care about being alive anymore.

She taught me this above all else: things which don't shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise we won't make it. We won't survive. That's what the witchery is counting on: that we will cling to the ceremonies the way they were, and then their power will triumph, and the people will be no more.

Linguistic diversity is integral to the cultural diversity that ensures some humans will survive in the event of one of the periodic global catastrophes. Local indigenous languages hold the keys to to survival because they contain the nouns, the names of the plants, insects, birds and mammals important locally to human survival.

Their mouths were wet and soured with beer, and when they pushed themselves down on her, they felt small and soft between her thighs. She stared at the stains on the ceiling, and waited until they gave up or fell asleep, and then she rolled out from under them.

Indian Song: Survival We went north to escape winter climbing pale cliffs we paused to sleep at the river. Cold water river cold from the north I sink my body in the shallow sink into sand and cold river water. …Mountain forest wind travels east and I answer: taste me, I am the wind touch me, I am the lean gray deer running on the edge of the rainbow.

I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.

I will tell you something about stories. They aren't just entertainment. They are all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have stories.

[Domestic violence is] a carefully laid physical, financial and psychological trap.

It's incredibly dangerous to leave an abuser, because the final step in the domestic violence pattern is: kill her.

After all, being alive is my top priority...Leslie from Love & Hugs, Leslie

As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.

The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.

Fifteen years ago tomorrow I had open heart surgery, a quintuple bypass surgery. Thanks to all of my doctors. Because of them, in 15 years of life I've been able to experience, well, acid reflux, short-term memory loss, and erectile dysfunction. Thanks for all your work. It's great to be alive.

It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended.

At this moment his dearest wish would have been just a moment's grace to immerse his face in a sinkfull of warm water. And maybe to have somebody hold him under till he drowned.

But at the same time I could feel the ordeal remaking me. You know? Like the desert itself was smelting me, melting away weaknesses and impurities and extracting what was hard and true.