Quotes About Survival

I never knew how much we consumed. It seems as if we are all appetite, as if a human being is simply a bundle of needs to drain the world. It's no wonder there are wars, no wonder the earth and water and air are polluted. It's no wonder the economy collapsed, if Eva and I use so much merely to stay alive.

I never knew how much we consumed. It seems as if we are all appetite, as if a human being is simply a bundle of needs to drain the world. It's no wonder there are wars, no wonder the earth and water and air are polluted. It's no wonder the economy collapsed, if Eva and I use so much merely to stay alive.

Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck-if you survive you start looking very carefully to the right and left.

The only reason that they say, 'Women and children first' is to test the strength of the lifeboats.

When her existence is threatened, the Church is absolved of all moral commandments

The eye of the trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive the light, there must have been light to enter it.

Right now, if I were lost in the wilderness, I feel that I could probably make it out, find a way to get home. I've learned a lot, and it's been great fun. Every single one of the caves in this last book I've been in--except for one very small one--and they really are exceptional.

The Clan lived by unchanging tradition. Every facet of their lives from the time they were born until they were called to the world of the spirits was circumscribed by the past. It was an attempt at survival, unconscious and unplanned except by nature in a last-ditch effort to save the race from extinction, and doomed to failure. They could not stop change, and resistance to it was self-defeating, anti-survival.

It's harder to kill people. The empathy is so much stronger that the mind must invent new reasons. But, if we can somehow link it to our own survival, the mind will make the devious twists and turns necessary to rationalize it. We're very good at that.

When you are alone, you have all the time in the world to practice whistling like a bird. When there is no one in the world you can turn to, a horse or .even a lion may give you companionship. When you don't know if there is anyone in the world like you, you seek contact with something living however you can

He's part me and part Clan, and so is Ura. Or rather, she's part Oda and part that man who killed her baby.

Your universe has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door...

Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.

Who needed excuses? It was each man for himself. It always had been, of course, that was the philosophy the world lived by; but now more so than ever.

I've noticed that in films about holocausts and disasters and such it's always a young girl and an old man, right at the end, who have to get together for the sake of the future. I don't think I could do that, not with an old man, though maybe I could if it was all there was.

At times such as these, evenings in the forest, loneliness seized her like a black dog. She kept telling herself it was pure weakness, that she had to be strong to stay alive in this world. Her orphanhood hung about her like a cloak. You shall not feel sorry for yourself, she commanded, and then disobeyed... beneath the surface veneer of stubborn independence, she needed desperately to belong to somebody.

The Gaulish language ended up contributing very little to the vocabulary of modern French. Only about a hundred Gaulish words survived the centuries, mostly rural and agricultural terms such as bouleau (birch), sapin (fir), lotte (monkfish), mouton (sheep), charrue (plow), sillon (furrow), lande (moor) and boue (mud)—that's eight percent of the total. However, Gaulish is still relatively well-known, partly because it left many place and family names in northern France.

Castaways on the shores of loneliness

Just as the Russians and the Soviets didn't manage to wipe out languages in Lithuania, neither have they managed to wipe out religion to the extent that we had feared.

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.

Old Veteran also loved to go on adventures. On one such adventure, a coyote attacked Old Veteran.

She'd hoped, like one of those desert rattlesnakes, to shed the skin of her anguish and leave it behind her in the Mexican dirt.

Despite everything, he likes being alive. Lydia doesn't know whether that's true for herself. For mothers, the question is immaterial anyway. Her survival is a matter of instinct rather than desire.

Lydia has a growing sense that her very humanity is under siege,