Quotes About Survival

The [Gila River area is] so utterly desolate, desert, and Godforsaken, that Kit Carson says a wolf could not make his living upon it." | U.S. Representative THOMAS HART BENTON addressing the house of representatives, June 26, 1854

But in 1856, Fort Yuma was hellish for reasons beyond the heat. It was bedeviled by blinding dust storms and prone to Indian attacks. The barracks were plagued with ants, gnats, and, when the river was high, mosquitoes, and the toilets were open trenches heaped with dirt and lime to squelch the stench.

She gave her name as "Olivino," recalled her father's surname as "Oatman" and said she'd had six siblings, mentioning Lucy and Lorenzo by name. She identified her abductors as Apaches. Asked if they had treated her well, she said, "No. They whipped me." In response to the same question about the Mohaves, she "seemed pleased," noted Burke, and answered, "Very well.

When the end of the world comes, it won't be the ones that cry who survive, but the ones who spit.

If we are lucky, we gradually gain an appreciation for how destruction can give rise to unprecedented forms of vitality, how our capacity to survive distress leaves behind a smoldering residue that we can draw on to constitute empowering life narratives. Although the process of living is perhaps inherently damaging, we can learn to make use of this damage—the same way that we can learn to make use of accidents—to generate more vigorous forms of life.

From an evolutionary perspective, he says, it is safest to err on the side of gullibility. "If you miss the tiger hiding in the grass, you're dead. If you're always seeing tigers, you're running away a lot, but you're not dead.

Listen,' someone whispers into my ear. 'Listen to me.' Am I dead? 'Listen,' the voice whispers. 'In some countries, you kill a monster when it's born. Other places, you kill it only when it kills someone else. Other places, you let it go, out into the forest or the sea, and it lives there forever, calling for others of its kind. Listen to me, it cries. Maybe it's just alone.

I would not be eaten, nor beaten, no skewered and swimmer I, no drowned dinner for a circle of cold companions, gobbling my guts, glutted on my gold.

How many times can you be shattered in the toasting, a champagne flute lifted and listing? How many times will you survive, a woman made of her own history, and more than it? How many times can you put your heart back together? As many times as you need to. You can make it through this.

I'm not depressed. I'm fucked up. I have been since I can remember. There's not a version of my life that isn't fucked up.

The survival of the fittest' – the strong MEN – means that the conquerors, the victors, are always right. This is precisely the ideology behind the rape laws and rape myths. Are we unable to see that those who subscribe to this sort of science also subscribe to fascism and imperialism?

She was trying to decide to regard the black flies as a good symptom of the liveliness of the North, a sign that nature will never capitulate, that man is red in tooth and claw but there is something that cannot be controlled by him, when a critter no larger than a fruitfly tore a hunk out of her shin through her trousers.

What doesn't kill us makes us funnier.

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

Together we can and must fight for justice for our children and protect them from draconian tax cuts and budget choices that threaten their survival, education and preparation for the future. If they are not ready for tomorrow, neither is America.

CIOs whose enterprises are fighting for survival need to place the most emphasis on building a new IS organization.

Ixion's not a place for friends. They die or they leave. On Ixion you need allies.

Your kind shouldn't come here. The change is too great for Seals. Yet you have chosen it and rejected your society, so you must learn quickly or perish.

Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive!

To wear the arctic foxyou have to kill it.

I was a queen, and you took away my crown a wife, and you killed my husband a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long.

Be warned, then: the collected volumes of this series will contain frozen mountains, foetid swamps, hostile foreigners, hostile fellow countrymen, the occasional hostile family member, bad decisions, misadventures in orienteering, diseases of an unromantic sort, and a plenitude of mud.

There are proverbs about frying pans and fires that I might have quoted to myself, but I preferred to adapt a different one to my purposes: better the devil that would attack everyone impartially than the devil specifically looking to kill us.

Sheep eat the grass, wolves eat the deer, and dragons eat everything that doesn't run away fast enough.