Quotes About Survival

And if I do live, I don't know if my body is ever going to be right again. I mean, even if I figure out what Ludovico's Ellicit is and get cured, I might look like Freddy Krueger's foreskin forever.

When you're drowning in Hell, even a cement life jacket can look good.

Fuck my old self. My old self got his life stolen by morons and the person he cared about most killed. If I start turning into that asshole again, I'll peel these scars off myself and put a shotgun to my forehead.

The 405 is one breakdown away from turning into the Donner Party.

She hands me back the bottle. The stuff we're drinking is vile. Greasy and fishy, but even flounder-flavored turpentine will taste good when it's the only drink in town.

What happened to your face?" she says. She pulls down my shirt a few inches. Spots more scars. "And the rest of you." "Never follow a foul ball into a wood chipper," I say. "We didn't even win the game.

Maybe I should have kept my rock. At least I wouldn't look quite so much like a deer caught in the headlights. No. I'd look like a deer with a rock. Forget it. We

Short of flamethrowers, nukes, or a bunch of trained Drifter killers, the best strategy is nature's simplest: run like you're a zebra at a waterhole and a pride of lions just showed up with ketchup and silverware.

All losers are romantics. It's what keeps us from blowing our brains out.

His liberators were leaving the freedman to wither on the vine.

Our genetic dispositions have a basis here- dispositions to dominate and to herd together for the sake of survival, to wander alone in hope of revelation, instinctively to seek more in order to allay fear of scarcity, and to stand silently, if only for a moment, in humility, and awe at all that exists beyond ourselves.

so then we had to find Jews to turn in so my father wouldn't die.

Our sensitivity to nature, and our humility within it, are essential to our physical and spiritual survival. Yet, our growing disconnection from nature dulls our senses, and eventually blunts even the sharpened sensory state created by man-made or natural disaster.

Genetically, we are essentially the same creatures as we were at the beginning. We are still hunters and gatherers.

Nature was still out there. There was less of it, to be sure, but it was there just the same.

The pleasure of being alive is brought into sharper focus when you need to pay attention to staying alive. Alive in the larger universe, alive in time.

A troubled life beats having no life at all

We in effect challenge the unwanted prodigy to produce forms that slip through our control systems. It does not take much to beat us. One seed in a thousand may germinate later than the last hoeing, pass through the sieve intended to exclude it, show a mysterious immunity to weedkillers. The following year there are five . . .

Experience had taught me that warthogs who tough it out are better in combat than your natural gazelles.

Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the concept came, amusing to him even in his pain. ... Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.

Come out, Neville.

A recent widely publicized case unites themes of no duty to retreat and, in individual terms, conquest and mastery. This was the case of the so-called "mountain man," Claude Dallas, who gained his livelihood in the i 97os and i9Hos by trapping animals in the wild, isolated country of desert and mountains where the three states of' Idaho, Oregon, and Nevada converge.

We are all of us blue babies. At critical seconds, we all lack necessary air.

Mubei: Zhongguo Liushi Niandai Da Jihuang Jishi [Tombstone: A Record of the Great Chinese Famine of the 60s], Cosmos Books, Hong Kong, 2008.