Quotes About Survival

We have to remember this," Parvana said. "When things get better and we grow up, we have to remember that there was a day when we were kids when we stood in a graveyard and dug up bones to sell so that our families could eat.

Grandmother was gone. The house was gone. Green Valley was gone.

We have to remember this," Parvana said. "When things get better and we grow up, we have to remember that there was a day when we were kids when we stood in a graveyard and dug up bones to sell so that our families could eat. Will anyone believe us? No. But we will know it happens

After Christian's death he'd just existed. He felt nothing, just a sense of emptiness. In some ways he welcomed that hollowness inside of him. It was easier to be numb, not caring beyond the basic needs to survive. But with spring's return, some intangible force stirred inside him, as if his emotions had been frozen through dead of winter. Now it was time to live again. His spirit awakened.

True confession: My dad wouldn't leave for Haiti until I proved to him that I could change a tire. According to him, that's like the one life skill you must know for human survival. That, and how to fry bacon.

Life unaffected by the blows of Fortune is a dead sea

When we were arguing on my twenty-fourth birthday, she left the kitchen, came back with a pistol, and fired it at me five times from right across the table. But she missed. It wasn't my life she was after. It was more. She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she'd done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

Talk into here. Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.

If illness didn't kill you, you died of bad luck.

Supposedly she'd died, but here she was again–somewhat changed, but you couldn't kill her. Not when the truest part of her hadn't even been born.

You've never felt good. Your suffering protects you. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free.

Survival was a breeze that touched some and not others. Neither hope nor hopelessness had anything to do with it.

Survival is the foundation of triumph.

I worked on a peak outside Bisbee, Arizona, where we were only eleven or twelve miles from the sun. It was a hundred and sixteen degrees on the thermometer, and every degree was a foot long. And that was in the shade. And there weren't no shade.

Well, you were sad about the kids for a while, for a month, two months, three months. You're sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don't do the women, you don't kill the animals, but after that you realize this is a war zone and everybody here lives in it. You don't care whether these people live or die tomorrow, you don't care whether you yourself live or die tomorrow, you kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the animals.

She knew: shit, we might as well have been drinking a dog's tears. Nothing mattered except that we were alive.

Skip experienced no excitement. Only the lethargy and sadness of a man freezing to death.

It was Lord of the Flies without table manners.

The world didn't give a shit. It didn't bestow. It took

And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)

Grief, he said, is carnivorous.

Teddy wished that his mother were still alive so she could teach her grandkids you had to get hard, strong. The world didn't give a shit. It didn't bestow. It took.

Had eyes Luther'd seen before in the white poor—spent his whole life eating rage in place of food. Developed a taste for it he wouldn't lose no matter how regular he ate for the rest of his life.

I'm driving a stolen car On a pitch black night And I'm telling myself I'm gonna be alright.