Quotes About Survival

The first thing you want to do after being shot is make sure you are not shot again.

In a few decades, the Indigenous population in Cuba declined by perhaps as much as 95 percent.

Look, we are not unspectacular things. We've come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

Caring for each other is a form of radical survival that we don't always take into account.

and I never knew survival was like that. If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.

Months later, when we went on our first date, I tried to seem put together, I wore a shawl she had given me. And her ring. I thought everything was behind me: death, and dying, and sickness. I didn't know I was changing my life— that I would have done anything, that what was left of me would become so ruthless to survive.

See, our job was simple: keep on living. Her job was harder, the hardest. Her job, her work, was to let the machine of survival break down, make the factory fail, to know that this war was winless, to know that she would singlehandedly destroy us all.

I think a lot about the word tenacity. What it takes to survive in a world that is sometimes beautiful and sometimes hostile. I'm always amazed at the body's willingness to continue, to keep going. The heart that keeps pumping, the lungs that keep breathing, the way the will to live can outsmart those other dark voices inside.

What I know now is she wanted something else for me. For me to wake each morning and recognise my own flesh, for this one thing she made—me—to remain how she intended, for one of us to make it out unscathed

The day I turned sixteen years old I had no idea that in a few weeks nearly everyone I cared about would be dead.

In hyperinflation, a kilo of potatoes was worth, to some, more than the family silver; a side of pork more than the grand piano. A prostitute in the family was better than an infant corpse; theft was preferable to starvation; warmth was finer than honour, clothing more essential than democracy, food more needed than freedom.

I did what most kids do when their world feels destroyed. I tried to care less about what remained...It was untrue, of course.

There's a limit, Alec. You don't want to think about it, but there's an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can't just negate that with sentimentality. With the idea of some indomitable spirit. That's a fairy tale. It's what people say about other people, to avoid the wretchedness. It's just cruelty by other means. Requiring a person to stay alive.

I did what most kids do when their world feels destroyed. I tried to care less about what remained...This was untrue, of course.

Do you feel for the man hungry enough to steal?" Commander Ga asked as they drove by. "Or for the men who must hunt him down?" "Isn't it the bird who suffers?" Sun Moon asked.

To survive in this world, you got to be many times a coward but at least once a hero

He had been the person who took. He'd been the one who was taken. And he'd been the one left behind. Next he would find out what it was like to be all three at once.

An ending to my story," he said. "My story's ended ten times already, and yet it never stops. The end keeps coming for me, and yet it takes everyone else. Orphans, friends, commanding officers, I outlast them all.

Adam Johnson

If everyone who had it shitty and bit the dust became a fart," he said, "the world would stink to the treetops, you know what I mean?

fucking motorcycles off the plane?" In darkness, they set down on the uninhabited island of

The successful forms of life are the parasites, the ones who bleed their environment to optimal exploitation, who stunt everything by taking a lion's share, who leave their hosts alive but shriveled. We

And you could always tell ginger plants whose tap root had penetrated a corpse: the blooms were large, iridescent yellow, and it was hard to jerk loose a plant whose roots had hooked a rib below.

the reports of which were so harrowing—forced abortions, amputations, communal executions—that I invented the blood harvesting as a less savage stand-in