Quotes About Survival

He fought for his very survival. If he fought dirty sometimes that does not diminish the fact that he refused to give up.

Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina is a coming-of-age novel about Ruth Ann (Bone) Boatwright and a difficult childhood made even harder by her violent and predatory stepfather.

In his dark story collection Poachers, Tom Franklin, who once worked in a grit factory, offers the sad and sorry lives of people stuck in the back-waters of the Alabama River, who tend to subsist on a steady diet of moon-shine and stale crackers.

Montserrat Fontes's disturbing novel of a family trying to survive the brutal Porfirio Díaz regime at the turn of the twentieth century, Dreams of the Centaur, is followed by First Confession.

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself, the means of inspiration and survival. —Sir Winston Churchill

The only way for me to survive with some dignity and recapture a corner of my sanity was to shut down the compartment that contained the painful memories, the insults, and the lies.

Who, after all, was to say, what was the 'right side' of the war, especially after the turmoil, the food shortages, and scarcity of luxuries?

The soldiers became desperate. 'We were absolutely, literally starved,' noted Private Joseph Martin in his diary. After four days without food, he gnawed a piece of black birch bark off a stick. Then, 'I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them.

Fear isn't actually a bad thing. It's a primitive instinct that's your friend. It warms you to pay attention, because you're in danger. It tells you to do something, to act, to save yourself.

We all have our personal Andes.

Even here, even as we suffer, life is still worth living....

I tell them I am not at peace in spite of what I suffered, but because of it.

I come from a plane that fell into the mountains. I am Uruguayan. We have been walking for ten days. I have a friend up here who is injured. In the plane there is fourteen injured people. We have to get of here quickly and we don't have any food. We are weak. When are you going to come and fetch us? Please. We can't even walk. Where are we?

We were playing a game against an unknown and unforgiving opponent. The stakes were terrible—play well or die—but we didn't even know the ground rules.

We understood, intuitively, that no one in this awful place could be judged by the standards of the ordinary world.

Haal adem. Haal nog één keer adem. Elke keer dat je ademhaalt, leef je.

I am alive,' I whispered to him. 'I am alive.

There is a part in each of us which holds fast to the old truth: either you are the hunter or you are the prey. Learn which you are. Act accordingly. Your life depends upon it.

The women will die just as much as the men will if we bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age. And then we'll be in the the Stone Age. Er. Yeah. And then there will be five thousand years of rebuilding, five thousand years where the only thing that matters is: can you hurt more, can you do more damage, can you instill fear? Yeah? And then the women will win.

Not the past, not the lines of pain inscribed on the human body, not a thing will ever disappear.

There is a part on each of us which holds fast to the old truth: either you are the hunter or you are the prey. Learn which you are. Act accordingly. Your life depends upon it.

READER, I RAN the fuck away.

There is an old joke: A physicist, an engineer, and an economist are stranded on a desert island with nothing but canned food. The physicist proposes to make a fire and heat the can until it bursts. The engineer proposes to climb to a local ridge and drop the can, which will burst on landing. The economist says: "Assume a can opener.

It just goes to show—killing your demons doesn't really end the torment. Real monsters leave behind damage. You can slay the beast a million times over—but the scars they inflict last forever.