Quotes About Survival

He was the one who told us about Ivo Mesic hightailing it out of there on the day the Ukrainian tried to kill you at DB.

But he was also scared, because you did not go into his line of work, or at least survive very long in it, without a commonsensical understanding of your own mortality.

Humans carried guns. And killed with malice, the only species that did.

Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable—and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach.

Someone once said that one measure of sentience was how much energy a sophont spent on matters other than survival. Fiben

Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea." "Why, as men do aland—the great ones eat up the little ones." —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE King Richard the Second

If we humans annihilate ourselves, mammalian genes are rich enough to replace us with another, maybe wiser race within a few million years. Perhaps descendants of coyotes or raccoons, creatures too adaptable ever to need refuge in arks. Too tough to be wiped out by any calamity the likes of us create.

Trouble is synonymous with being a metabolizing entity.

Necessity is a mother.

Some species are so disdainful of brains that they treat them as an expendable luxury. There are species of sea slugs that have mini-brains when they are young. They use them as they voyage through the seas looking for a perch from which they can sieve food. But once they've found their perch they no longer need such an expensive piece of equipment, so they eat their brains. Some have joked, cruelly, that this is a bit like tenured academics.

The sixth secret is that, as Charles Darwin tried to explain, survival of the fittest is not determined by competitive strength, but rather by social desirability. There's more money than certified talent in the world of investing, so outstanding investment managers have many choices because so many investors want to be their clients.

Hang me upside-down and fuck me in both ears. You pulled yourself out of a clinical depression by being a freaking hero.

and suddenly it occurred to him that the birds, whose twitters and repeated songs sounded so pretty and affirming of nature and the coming day, might actually, in a code known only to other birds, be the birds each saying 'Get away' or 'This branch is mine!' or 'This tree is mine! I'll kill you! Kill, kill!' Or any other manner of dark, brutal, or self-protective stuff—they might be listening to war cries. The thought came from nowhere and made his spirits dip for some reason.

Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est (Roughly, 'They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier').

People who're somehow burned at birth, withered or ablated way past anything like what might be fair, they either curl up in their fire, or else they rise.

the ideas of ravacious herds of feral domesticated housepets and oversized insects not only taking over the abandoned homes of relocated Americans but actually setting up house and keeping them in model repair and impressive equity

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

My ambitions at this point are modest and mostly surround staying alive.

the feeling that you'd do absolutely anything or say or trade anything to persuade him to simply settle for rape and let you go, or even torture, even willing to bring to the bargaining table a bit of nonlethal torture if only he'd settle for hurting you and choose to drive off and leave you hurt and breathing in the weeds and sobbing at the sky and traumatized beyond all recovery instead of as nothing

Tiene que ver con llegar a los treinta años, o incluso a los cincuenta, sin querer pegarte un tiro en la cabeza.

no man put his tongue on D. W. Gately and lived

It's all optional; do it or die.

we get old like animals. We get claws, the shape of our face is the shape of our skull, our lips retreat back from big teeth like we're baring to snarl. Sharp, snarling, old: who should wonder at how nobody cares if I hurt, except another snarler?

Elige tu templo de fanatismo con suma atención. Lo que vosotros quisierais cantar como amor trágico es un vínculo mal elegido. ¿Morir por una persona? Eso es una locura. Las personas cambian, se van, mueren, enferman. Se marchan, mienten, enloquecen, enferman, te traicionan, mueren. Vuestra nación os sobrevive. Una causa os sobrevive