Quotes About Survival

Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world.

Joe Chip said, 'I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.

Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed.

The rule of survival, he thought. Keep eye peeled regarding situation around you. Learn its demands. And- meet them. Be there at the right time doing the right thing.

Sheep are funny, the Whitlock said. Now, you look at how they behave when you throw some grub over the fence to them, such as corn stalks. Why, they'll spot that from a mile away. The Whitlock chuckled. They're smart when it comes to what concerns them. And maybe that helps us see what true smartness is; it isn't having read a lot of big books, or knowing long words...it's being able to spot what's to our advantage. It's got to be useful to be real smartness.

And after all, they had been successful with the Jews and Gypsies and Bible Students.

I'm not much but I'm all I have.

Pris had now cut three legs from the spider, which crept about miserably on the kitchen table, seeking a way out, a path to freedom. It found none.

In a 1981 interview with Gregg Rickman, Dick describes a nature documentary he viewed in the 1960s in which a female Galápagos turtle crawled the wrong direction after laying her eggs in the sand and began to die from exposure while still moving her limbs. That night Dick heard a voice tell him that the turtle believed that she had made it back to the ocean, adding, "And she shall see the sea.

Are we to assist it in gaining power, in order to save our lives? Is that the paradox of our earthly situation?

Because when the death-dealing powers of ice and cold reach your loins, your breasts and hips and buttocks as well as your heart—it was already deep in her heart, surely—then there will be no more woman. And you won't survive that. No matter what I or any man chooses to do.

It was a brilliant idea and the only idea that could have worked. Up above, on the ruined, blasted surface of what had once been a living planet, the leady crawled and scurried, and fought Man's war. And undersurface, in the depths of the planet, human beings toiled endlessly to produce the weapons to continue the fight, month by month, year by year.

And what good was a political strategist who couldn't look ahead to his own death? Without that he would have been merely another Hitler, who didn't want his country to survive him.

If you don't buy, they'll kill you. The perfect sales-pitch. Buy or die—new slogan.

Outside, a bug on tall legs picked through the heaps. It ate, and then something squashed it and went on, leaving it squashed with its dead teeth sunk into what it had wanted to eat. Finally its dead teeth got up and crawled out of its mouth in different directions.

drive the wild Bleekmen from their last

There should be a monument somewhere, he thought, listing those who died in this. And, worse, those who didn't die. Who had to live on past death.

We're all going to be little brown gophers. We'll all have to learn to dig down in the rubble and find the good things, because that's where they'll be.

What does it mean, to die? he wondered. Uniqueness always perishes. Nature works by overproducing each species; uniqueness is a fault, a failure of nature. For survival there should be hundreds, thousands, even millions of one species, all interchangeable—if all but one dies, then nature has won. Generally it loses. But himself. I am unique, he realized. So I am doomed, Every man is unique and hence doomed. A melancholy thought.

The drive of unliving things is stronger than the drive of living things.

Well, following the line of least resistance, that's the rule of survival. Following, not leading." Another voice, older, said, "Yes, the followers survive the leader. Like with Christ. Not vice versa.

That's why their lives are worse than ours; they can't give up and die - they have to go on.

In our time we maintain colonies on Mars, on Luna; we're perfecting workable interstellar flight—these people have not been able to cope with the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma. This

and vast ugly teeth strove to crunch him, crunch him with avid relish.