Quotes About Survival

That's when Adam realizes: Humankind is deeply ill. The species won't last long. It was an aberrant experiment.

Quédate quieto. Espera. Algo en el solitario superviviente sabe que se puede resistir más allá de la irrefutable ley del Ahora.

Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intention. Forest. A threatened creature.

Douglas Pavlick works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. 'Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child's play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

But he'd survived his mother's death. I figured he'd survive my best intentions.

couldn't imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet.

Two barred owls traded their call-and-response: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all? Who would ever cook for this boy, aside from me? I couldn't imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet. Maybe I didn't want him to. I liked him otherworldly.

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people

Mysteriously, almost unaccountably, my family had ended up in the trees, sort of like the Swiss Family Robinson.

viruses never go away, they only hide

There was one case in which a man in Level 4 suddenly began screaming, "Get me out of here!"—and he tore off his space suit's helmet, taking great gasps of air from Level 4. (They dragged him into a chemical shower and kept him there for a while.)

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species

Are you worried about a species-threatening event?" He stared at me. "What the hell do you mean by that?" "I mean a virus that wipes us out." "Well, I think it could happen. Certainly it hasn't happened yet. I'm not worried. More likely it would be a virus that reduces us by some percentage. By thirty percent. By ninety percent.

A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out

A virus does not "want" to kill its host. That is not in the best interest of the virus, because then the virus may also die, unless it can jump fast enough out of the dying host into a new host.

A six-foot-tall man and a ten-pound monkey are pretty evenly matched in a stand-up fight. The monkey will be all over the man. By the end of the fight, the man may need hundreds of stitches, and could be blinded.

what mankind must do to save itself is to launch an enterprise aimed at leaving the earth. On this task he thought the energies of mankind could be concentrated and the need for heroism could be satisfied.

The MP's hunted antelope with machine guns for fresh meat and for sport. Groves authorized only cold showers for his troops; their isolated duty would win them eventual award for the lowest VD rate in the entire U.S. Army.

If most of the area of habitat is destroyed, and a fraction of the area is saved as a reserve, the reserve will initially contain more species than it can hold at equilibrium. The excess will gradually go extinct. The smaller the reserve, the higher will be the extinction rates…. Different species require different minimum areas to have a reasonable chance of survival.

Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.

Twentieth Century Book of the Dead.

As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our "survival dance," but we never get to our actual "sacred dance.

No civilization has ever survived unless the elders saw it their duty to pass on gifts of Spirit to the young ones.

No civilization has ever survived unless the elders saw it their duty to pass on gifts of Spirit to the young ones. Is it that we are selfish, or is it that we ourselves have never found the gift ourselves? I suspect it is largely the latter. I don't think most people are terribly selfish. They just don't know.