Quotes About Survival

Do you see the irony at all, Tristan?' I stare at him and shake my head. He seems determined not to speak again until I do. 'What irony?' I ask eventually, the words tumbling out in a hurried heap. 'That I am to be shot as a coward while you get to live as one.

The last image I had of her was her sitting on the platform at Thorpe as a group of people stared at this distressed, weeping woman, and then her charging towards the glass of my window seat as the train pulled out of the station. I had gasped, thinking she meant to throw herself under the wheels, but no, she had simply wanted to attack me, that was all. If she had got her hands on me, she might have killed me. And I might have let her.

I hope he didn't suffer too much." "He did," she said. "But he was very stoical about it. It's those of us who are left behind who'll have to suffer now.

I've known violence, I've known bigotry. I've known shame and I've known love. And somehow, I always survive.

It starts in the schoolyard, with small boys fighting among each other. In the 1930s, the Reich found a people to hate. Now, twenty years later, it's us who are hunted down. When they discover one of us, they bring us to a courtroom so the world can hear of our crimes but, really, all they want is to shoot us, hang us, kill us in any way they can. We're all just trying to survive.

What is important to note is that we can't know what we don't know. Denial, idealization, repression and dissociation are unconscious survival mechanisms. Because they are unconscious, we lose touch with the shame, hurt and pain they cover up. We cannot heal what we cannot feel. So without recovery, our toxic shame gets carried for generations.

Evolution by means of natural selection (or indeed any kind of selection—natural or unnatural) provides the most beautiful, elegant explanation in all of science.

The walls were chipped and needed paint. The windows were mostly okay but one pane was blocked with cardboard. There were fleas the exterminator couldn't kill and rats that scrabbled in the walls and mice who left droppings like a cocked snook and roaches that thrived on insecticide, even the illegal kinds.

But the habit patterns, inevitably, had survived. To the air, with a wry grin, he murmured, "How long, O Lord? How long?" In his private estimation: not long now.

our threshold of survival-prone behavior is so high it takes the prospect of total extermination to activate modes of placation and compromise, may there not be other processes, equally life-preserving, which can similarly be triggered off only at a far higher level of stimulus

Governments rely on threat and trauma to survive. The easiest populace to rule is weak, poor, superstitious, preferably terrified of what tomorrow may bring

I'm an economical soul, and if I'm going to be hanged I want a good stake for my neck.

When a man comes out of great danger, he is apt to be a little deaf to the call of duty.

It is the place and time for dark deeds, for the heart grows savage; and if two enemies met in the hollow of the mist only one would go away.

Times slows when your life is in danger. Every second takes a minute to pass, and even the smallest event gets chiseled into memory. (95)

My first rule, everyday, was to find enough food to make it to the next day. Then I could afford the luxury of worrying about the enemy.

Break a person's heart and you become a kind of amnesiac killer. All the empathy you possess is momentarily held in abeyance while you address yourself wholeheartedly to your own emotional survival. You're just doing what you have no choice but to do. You're just living. Then it's over, and standing amid the wreckage of your life you remember.

The problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

Efficiency is the foundation for survival. Effectiveness is the foundation of success.

Se dice que un individuo puede vivir cuarenta días sin comida, cuatro días sin agua, cuatro minutos sin aire, pero solo cuatro segundos sin esperanza.

Efficiency is the foundation for survival. Effectiveness is the foundation for success. It's Not How Hard You Work; It's How Smart You Work

His right hand had been chopped off at the wrist by one of Mussolini's public executioners, and now that the old man's enemies were dead, he carried the stump proudly.

Everybody has difficult years but sometimes they end up being the greatest years of your life, if you survive them.

Sometimes life put us in difficult situations just to test if we have the strength to survive it.