Quotes About Survival

Hope doesn't die just because a life is lost, or even a million lives.

How you humans survive so much experience is something I shall never understand. To do so much and react to it all in the way you do is as much a curse as a blessing. You never take time to digest and appreciate what happens to you.

Are you sure it is trustworthy, Mellanie?" "I'd be dead if it wasn't." "Yes, I suppose that does generate a respectable level of personal confidence.

We shall argue that attachment is not an end in itself; rather, it exists in order to produce a representational system that has evolved, we may presume, to aid human survival.

Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

What is the point of building a large nervous system if your life is over in a year or two? The machinery of intelligence is expensive, both to build and to run.

mammals and birds can live longer, if they don't get eaten

A joke I used to know said that if you were planning a trip into the deepest wilderness you should pack a bottle of gin and a bottle of vermouth, and never open them unless and until you became hopelessly lost. Then, wherever you were, when you took your two bottles out of your kit bag, someone would come over the horizon and tell you how to make a better martini.

There are mornings when it feels as if you rise up to the surface through a mud bath. With your feet stuck in a block of cement. When you know that you've expired in the night and have nothing to be happy about except the fact that at least you've already died so they can't transplant your lifeless organs.

In qualche modo è come quando avevamo diciassette anni. Crediamo che la disperazione ci bloccherà completamente, ma non lo fa, si incapsula in un punto scuro da qualche parte dentro di noi, e costringe il resto del sistema a funzionare , a occuparsi di cose pratiche che forse non sono importanti ma che ci tengono in movimento, garantendo che in qualche modo siamo vivi.

An oxygen gauge.

For non-Jews in Europe, the top priority in the Middle East is not the survival of a Jewish state; the top priorities are political calm, access to oil, and sufficient economic development of the region so that its burgeoning and overwhelmingly young population does not swamp Europe's declining and aging one.

The survivors who came off best were Jewish Germans who managed to flee the country before the Holocaust or who survived it somehow on German soil.

No: Human beings, by orders of magnitude, remained the most vicious animal on the planet.

Also I wonder how Bangley is built inside and everyone like him. He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. Prefers it. Will protect it to the death. Lives for protecting it the way a peregrine lives for killing other birds midflight. Does not want to communicate what the death and the beauty do to each other inside him.

Human beings, by orders of magnitude, remained the most vicious animal on the planet.

It was not as if they lived, exactly, but maybe they were not lost forever to the great dark. That they endured in the weather and the seasons.

There is a pain you can't think your way out of. You can't talk it away. If there were someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. Leave his venison in the trail for the coyotes the jays. And. You can't metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of your gut. Muscle sinew bone. It is all of you.

They buried their faces between the cobbles in inches of water and they felt a wind like some demonic thing, like nothing on earth, a searing gust that pummeled the canoe, they could hear the burning wood flail against it, the tick of embers, they were lying in the water heads down in the ice runnels between stones and could not help but hear the passing over of hell.

with a sense of having been spared and having been blessed.

like We Die Alone, about the Norwegian commando who outskied an entire Nazi division,

he didn't seem to mind being cold and wet or exhausted the way other people did. It wasn't fun, but then life wasn't meant to be that fun. That was the difference, Wynn thought. For Jack, stuff like cold and hunger didn't have a value, good or bad, they just were, and it was best if they didn't last that long; but if they did, as long as one survived them, no harm, no foul. It gave Jack a strength, a temper, that Wynn admired.

People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the weight of their suffering. Only those with bad memories, the fittest to survive, can live on. - Lu Xun

He would turn out fine, too. Most of them were that way. They were tough and sweet and funny and sad, and people like that would always survive. It wasn't necessarily gold, but perhaps because of that it would stay.