Quotes About Survival

We've already been killed, all of us. It happened so long ago, we've forgotten it.

On peut tout te prendre; tes biens, tes plus belles années, l'ensemble de tes joies, et l'ensemble de tes mérites, jusqu'à ta dernière chemise. Il te restera toujours tes rêves pour réinventer le monde que l'on t'a confisqué...

This is no world for gentle people

Cum o fi oare sentimentul de singur?tate la animale?

Por qué florecía aquel loto en medio de una hoguera? ¿Por qué no se marchitaba?

It was also clear that in order to survive at this game, we had to get serious.

There are so many different ways to be poor

The planet is finished with us, at this point -

he] had become the bloke in the joke: the last man on earth

Those are my bougainvillea—I got Victoria to plant them today, but I don;t know if they will survive. But Right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing.

But like all things, the business has two sides. Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they? Par exemplum: when I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery, it was. And they died because of it, you see? Poor bastards. Or rather I survived, to look at it in another way, do you see?

That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made.

What could she know about the waves of time that simply come at a person, one after the other? What could she know about life as the temporary, always partial, survival of that process?

Give me four days. If I'm not back in four days you'll know I'm dead. For that only shall keep me. Oh! Bess, I'll come back. There's danger—I wouldn't lie to you—but I can take care of myself.

wild men in wild places, fighting cold, heat, starvation, thirst, barrenness, facing the elements in all their ferocity, usually retrograded, descended to the savage, lost all heart and soul and became mere brutes.

go upright among those who are down on their knees those with their backs turned those toppled in the dust you have survived not so that you might live you have little time you must give testimony be courageous when reason fails you be courageous in the final reckoning it is the only thing that counts and your helpless Anger - may it be like the sea whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

And if the City falls but a single man escapes. He will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile. He will be the City.

if we lose the ruins nothing will be left

cemeteries grow larger the number of defenders shrinks but the defense continues and will last to the end and even if the City falls and one of us survives he will carry the City inside him on the roads of exile he will be the City we look at the face of hunger the face of fire the face of death and the worst of them all—the face of treason and only our dreams have not been humiliated

This was a hard, unforgiving world. The only way to survive was to beat it at its own game.

If you're silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

Well, she thought, that big old dawg with the hatred in his eyes had killed her after all.

Kossula was no longer on the porch with me. He was squatting about that fire in Dahomey. His face was twitching in abysmal pain. It was a horror mask. He had forgotten that I was there. He was thinking aloud and gazing into the dead faces in the smoke. His agony was so acute that he became inarticulate. He never noticed my preparation to leave him. So I slipped away as quietly as possible and left him with his smoke pictures.

Through this publication, Barracoon extends our knowledge of and understanding about the experiences of Africans prior to their disembarkation into the Americas. Like a relic pulled up from the bottom of the ocean floor, Barracoon speaks to us of survival and persistence. It recalls the disremembered and gives an account for the unaccounted. As an expression of the feelings and attitudes of one who survived the Middle Passage, it is rare in the annals of history.