Quotes About Survival

For a long time, my mother's wasn't dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story. My father could have given in to the bottle or the needle or a woman and left my brother and me to care for ourselves - or worse, in the care of New York City Children's Services, where, my father said, there was seldom a happy ending. But this didn't happen. I know now that what is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory.

And I can't help thinking of the birds here—how they disappear in the wintertime, heading south for food and warmth and shelter. Heading south to stay alive . . . passing us on the way

This, she thought inanely, is the part where I am supposed to run. Oh, and that screaming thing

Daenaira, Magnus realized, had the fighting instinct of a berserker. For her, once battle began, it didn't stop until she no longer felt threatened.

When someone you love that much leaves you behind there isn't as much of you left to die when your own time comes.

Only two possibilities are left to the individual: either he remains what he was, in which case he becomes more and more unadapted, neurotic, and inefficient, loses his possibilities of subsistence, and is at last tossed on the social rubbish heap, whatever his talents may be; or he adapts himself to the new sociological organism, which becomes his world, and he becomes unable to live except in a mass society.

The future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two generations, and there are two absolute requisites: We must aim at a stable-state society [with limited population growth] and the destruction of nuclear stockpiles. … Otherwise I don't see how we can survive much later than 2050.

I WAS BORN on the eighteenth of December, 1935, in the town Bourg-en-Bresse, about thirty miles northeast of Lyon, the second of three sons of Jeanne and Jean-Victor Pépin. Weighing only two and one half pounds, I nearly died at birth. The midwife lined a shoebox with dishtowels and put me inside, placing the makeshift incubator between two bricks that had been warmed on the stove.

Este pu?in provocator, bineîn?eles, dar putem ast?zi s? consider?m omul ca celula canceroas? a organismului Terra. O celul? care prolifereaz? asigurându-?i dezvoltarea în detrimentul altora, distrugându-le pentru a-?i asigura propria sa dezvoltare.

I had learned in the last two years that the more demanding the basic needs of self-preservation grow, the closer one comes to nature.

Olvidados en las selvas de Chiapas, los templos y las pirámides de Palenque o de Yaxchilán han sobrevivido durante más de mil años a los asaltos de los elementos y de las plantas, en tanto que los de México sucumbieron a la voluntad destructora de los hombres.

Casi nada sabemos [...] del macehualli cuyo trabajo alimentaba a los habitantes de la ciudad [...]. Por ello es necesario mencionarlo [...] tanto más cuanto que después del desastre de 1521, después de la destrucción total de las fuerzas y de las ideas, de las estructuras sociales y de las religiones, sólo él sobrevivió y sobrevive todavía.

The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.

I grew up in a neighborhood in Baltimore that was like a war zone, so I never learned to trust that there were people who could help me.

Si SOBREVIVES, si persistes, canta, sueña, emborráchate. Es el tiempo del frío: ama, apresúrate. El viento de las horas barre las calles, los caminos. Los árboles esperan: tú no esperes, éste es el tiempo de vivir, el único.

I'd be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were efficient.

If you're going to fight, fight like you're the third monkey on the ramp to Noah's Ark. And brother, it's starting to rain. — on a t-shirt being sold by a Bangkok street vendor

A task like that would have killed a thoughtful person, but he went on to live a very long life.

Unless we rise up against the dark side of evil, The Crown and The Spoon will not survive.

No matter how hard he ran, how carefully he hid himself or what he might find as a weapon, he knew they would eventually locate him. It was as inevitable as the dark between the stars. And

Bad things can happen, and often do--but they only take up a few pages of your story; and anyone can survive a few pages.

Twenty-six thousand feet up the cols of Everest, a long way beyond the staying power of plants, pale spiders have been found, who subsist on nothing more discernible than air. Apparently they also reproduce their kind. What else they do with their time and, for that matter, why, no one has yet made out.

Ghetel was clawing at the rotten bark on the underside of the big fallen tree that sheltered them. Bark debris and wood-punk kept falling on the blanket. Ghetel, a silhouette against the half-light, would scrabble in the decaying wood for a moment, then pause and put something to her mouth

James Alexander Thom