Quotes About Survival

The criminal profile of corpse-eaters was surprising. Only 2 percent had a previous criminal record. They were primarily women, uneducated females with no employment and no local Leningrad address. They were, in other words, often refugees who had fled to the city and who therefore did not have ration books at all. They had to make a choice between eating those already dead or dying themselves.

People want to forget. You can't blame them.

Artistic flourishes like this may have seemed like a waste of energy, but they were central to the survival of the city and the pride of its inhabitants.

The natural world is so adaptable...So adaptable you wonder what's natural.

It's still alive, the stubborn little thing. What shall we do with it? Strangle it. We]ll register it as a stillbirth. Don't wipe its face. Illegal babies aren't entitled to have their mucus removed.

It's still alive, the stubborn little thing. What shall we do with it? Strangle it. We'll register it as a stillbirth. Don't wipe its face. Illegal babies aren't entitled to have their mucus removed.

A man who is used to acting in one way never changes; he must come to ruin when the times, in changing, no longer are in harmony with his ways.

The temptation is powerful to close our eyes and wait for the worst to pass, but history tells us that for freedom to survive, it must be defended and that if lies are to stop, they must be exposed.

Worldwide, there are more refugees huddled in camps than there have been since the Nazi surrender almost three-quarters of a century ago

The inherent tensions between the White House and the press should not worry a president who is disciplined about observing certain elementary tactics of survival. Take responsibility, admit mistakes, put out bad news quickly, and acknowledge inconsistencies before others point them out.

In April 1945, immediately before surrendering the construction site, the Germans locked 1,046 of the workers into a barn and burned them alive.

On June 9, 1942, R?žena Spieglová was one of a group of Czechoslovak Jews sent by rail transport to the Nazi concentration camp in Terezín. On June 12, they were transported farther east to a destination we do not know for sure, probably a forested area in occupied Poland. There were no survivors from that transport. My maternal grandmother was fifty-four years old when she was murdered.

If you're trapped in a room, and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. You have to climb out and save yourself. It's obvious, Li-ling, that crying doesn't help a person live.

By early 1979, the border area is a dead-eyed, stinking hell. He signs on as an aid worker with the Red Cross and they give him a stipend and a room. In January, the Vietnamese Communists crossed the Cambodian border, swept the Khmer Rouge aside, and took Phnom Penh in less than two weeks. The refugees wash up in their black clothes, so debilitated and disturbed that Hiroji thinks he is walking through an exhumed cemetery, they are more soil and sickness than human beings.

Her mother, she thought, had all the attributes of the famous proverb: one who thrives in calamity but perishes in soft living.

Was this a real story, Sparrow had wondered, or was it something like the book of records, an imagines survival?

There are no bargains between lion and men. I will kill you and eat you raw.

But of course I could not die. I would live on, through each scalding moment to the next. This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.

I did not plan to live after he was gone.

We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory.

The world is an ugly place. We must live in it.

We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?

A moment passed, and then I felt her hand on my back. You will be all right, she said. I have done it, and look, I live.

Es correcto buscar la paz para los muertos —insiste Príamo con voz amable—. Tú y yo sabemos bien que no la hay para quienes los sobreviven. —No —susurra Aquiles.