Quotes About Survival

And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance. The mind creates an alternative state.

Courage is not what it took to survive. Quite the opposite! You had to be a coward to survive.

This is our country. He was rejecting Adrian's offer of help. It was this that had stung so much, the idea he was neither wanted nor needed. It had simply never occurred to him. Attila. The man is right, of course. People here don't need therapy so much as hope. But the hope has to be real- Attila's warning to Adrian. I fall down, I get up. Westerners Adrian has met despise the fatalism. But perhaps it is the way people have found to survive.

in the absence of political order, human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.

Eviction," Frieda said. "You can't pay, you can't stay." She said in Yiddish, "Es iz shver tzu makhen a leben." It's hard to make a living.

Carny people'd punch you in the face before they'd let you tell them your troubles and strangle their own selves before they'd tell you theirs.

the Old West, mysterious, serious, with great beauty at every vista and terrible things happening whenever any people appeared.)

My dad is dead. And as I type this, by the window, on the rainy day, I am alive, yes. I am living. But sometimes it doesn't feel like I am doing it fast enough, or hard enough, or all the way. And it is times like that when I can understand wanting a cigarette in my hand, then my mouth, then my hand again. Holding the cigarette. Tending to the cigarette. Giving the cigarette what it needs. Tapping it in the ashtray. Sucking on it. Then flicking it in the street, like it meant nothing to me.

She lifted the girl's shirt, showing her ribs and the pointy bumps of her spine. They were like the bones of some animal who'd starved to death in the desert. Her flesh, the dark sand blown in thin drifts over the bones.

Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.

I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.

This time, he fumbled for Collin's hand in the elevator. He still felt like a thief, there was no denying it, but sometimes thieves stole things because they needed them to live.

I'm starting to think being a grown-up isn't going to school or even paying your own rent. It's learning to fake it when you got no other choice.

And like Mikhail, when he had slid from dance to drugs to the streets at the age of fifteen, she had lived and breathed a profession in which it was better to be high than even a pound above the minimum weight to sustain life.

the SUV didn't just meet a tree. The subject drove it into a tree, running from a grizzly bear, because the subject was going to take out a half-grown cub with an AK-47 semiauto.

broken. "Please, God. Let him live." He slumped to the ground then, elbows holding his weight as he buried his face in his arms and cried.

You live. Whether I'm out there or not, you live. Because leaving you is going to be like ripping my arms off, and my lungs, and all the other things, and the only thing keeping me from bleeding out is going to be knowing you're okay. So you find a purpose, you start school, you fall in love again, but you live!

Crick once showed up at a crash site and said, "Holy God, no wonder the guy didn't make it!" right before the victim opened his eyes and said, "I'm still alive, jackass, now help get this fence post out of my chest!

If he'd grown up in Death Valley, he figured driving an ambulance in Kuwait wouldn't feel like the seventh sphincter of the armpit demon living in hell's tenth colon.

Yes, sir." "Doing this?" The guy used his hat to gesture to the framed porch. "No, sir. Fucking for money.

This was a problem when he hit the pothole in the shitty road, broke the axle, and got thrown headfirst into the windshield at twenty-five miles an hour.

Living poor gives you a really short view of the world. You live to your next meal, your next paycheck, your next birthday, your next high.

the street that depends on the crumbs from the criminals' table that stole his wealth to survive or the officer whose life and family are constantly on edge? They will just have to keep fighting crime and hope that someday people would be afraid to commit crimes, and people would be brave enough to stand up against corruption.