Quotes About Survival

The moment people move off land which has directly supported them, the necessities of life are removed from individual control. The things people could formerly produce for their survival must now be paid for.

If we take the word "need" to mean something basic to human survival—food, shelter, clothing—or basic to human contentment—peace, love, safety, companionship, intimacy, a sense of fulfillment—these will be sought and found by people whether or not there is advertising. In fact, advertising intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from direct fulfillment and urges them to believe that satisfaction can be obtained only through commodities.

I remember thinking, "Well, but I wouldn't have to be that funny anyway. I would just have to be funny enough to buy a loaf of Wonder bread and a jar of Skippy peanut butter a week." I could easily survive on that.

I mean if she's real, she's in big trouble. How long do you think somebody who's really like that is going to last around here?

This was the history of the world. Recovery and collapse, despair and relief. The dialectic of clean and dirty. Every time is worse than the time before. The bad things come, days and nights and days and nights get so unbelievably fucked up, unbelievably fast, but in the end-- if there is an end-- everybody's best self just slogs forward, one stagger, one fall, one day, one 'what the fuck just happened?' moment of oblivion and soul-broken joy at a time. All we have to do is not die.

There's no deodorant for desperation.

Fire, they said, is no natural friend to man. That is why one must humor it.

Here and there nurses directed emaciated people in striped clothes; the soldiers looked at them in sudden silence—those were the people saved from the furnaces who were returning to life from the concentration camps.

In some versions of the story, the boy had been tortured, made to drink the blood of his captors, and forced to walk home naked. Except no one seemed to have a name to go with their stories. Who had been attacked?

Starbucks is, unsurprisingly, the only thing open in this storm, commerce's cockroach

Years passed and I found myself still a husk, still in that moment, still in the day my war ended, the day I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn't the same thing as living.

the world is built to eat you alive, but before you go down the gullet, the bastards can't stop you from looking around.

All people, except this rich cream, living and scraping and fighting and dying, and for what, nothing, the cold millions with no chance in this world.

I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn't the same thing as living.

Your parents died. Your world fell apart. I nod. He puts his hand on my cheek. You were left drowning I nod again. And you're struggling to breathe I am. It's a constant struggle to stay near the surface I have just enough air to stop me from going totally under, but not enough to thrive. So do it. Breathe. Just Breathe. He turns up the volume and strokes my hair.

No one gets through life unscathed.

We eat. We sleep. We keep going.

It's a frightening world to be alone in.

Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.

My problem is that the human race seems to want to be destroyed!

The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator.

It's a sort of literary act of survival. I don't have many words to express myself--rather, the opposite. I'm aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need.

When Deepa poured Bela some water from the urn that stood on a little stool, in the corner of the room, her grandmother reproached her. Not that water. Give her the boiled water. She's not made to survive here.

Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end. "Gogol