Quotes About Survival

This book is a memoir - not of specific life events, but of the processes of dissociation, and of re-enlivening emotions that are shameful to admit or even to feel. It is an account of the altered states that trauma induces, which make it possible to survive a life-threatening event but impair the capacity to feel fear, and worse still, impair the ability to love.

Here is what I think now, reading what I wrote down for the police at age fifteen, right after I was raped. I was a good girl. Always a good girl, even when I was bad. I did my homework. If I can only be good enough, someone will eventually notice that I am trying so hard, exhausting myself with my effort to be good. This is true even today.

Why does the threat of violent death alter some of us, even if subtly, forever? Why does it make us unusually numb or calm when we ought to feel terrified? Why do scents or sounds trigger in some of us a feeling of terror or unbearable dread, even in situations where we know, at least, intellectually, that we are perfectly safe?

Senza amore, l'umanità non sopravvivrebbe un solo giorno.

To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death.

We naïvely believe that things like tables and lamps exist as such, and we fail to see that society teaches us to transform sensations into perceptions that permit us to manipulate the world around us in order to enable us to survive in a given culture. Once we have given such percepts a name, the name seems to guarantee the final and unchangeable reality of the percept.

El hombre sólo puede ser humano en un clima en el que pueda esperar que él y sus hijos vivirán para ver el año siguiente y muchos más años por vivir.

This need for self-preservation is that part of human nature which needs satisfaction under all circumstances and therefore forms the primary motive of human behaviour.

To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever.

No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.

We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.

No soldier outlives a thousand chances.

We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall. - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 6

Our damnable memory is a sieve. It wants to survive. And survival is only possible through forgetfulness.

Those are for us,' growls Detering. 'Don't talk rubbish,' Kat snaps back at him. 'You'll be lucky to get a coffin at all,' grins Tjaden, 'they'll just use a tarpaulin to wrap up that target-practice dummy you call a body, you wait and see.

Trommelfeuer, Sperrfeuer, Gardinenfeuer, Minen, Gas, Tanks, Maschinengewehre, Handgranaten - Worte, Worte aber sie umfassen das Grauen der Welt.

Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe. The gas still creeps over the ground and sinks into all hollows. Like a big, soft jellyfish it floats into our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely.

Für niemand ist die Erde so viel wie für den Soldaten. Wenn er sich an sie presst, lange, heftig, wenn er sich tief mit dem Gesicht und mit den Gliedern in sie hineinwühlt in der Todesangst des Feuers, dann ist sie sein einziger Freund, sein Bruder, seine Mutter, er stöhnt seine Furcht und seine Schreie in ihr Schweigen und ihre Geborgenheit, sie nimmt sie auf und entlässt ihn wieder zu neuen zehn Sekunden Lauf und Leben, fasst ihn wieder und manchmal für immer.

I cannot bear to look at his hands, they are like wax. Under the nails is the dirt of the trenches, it shows through blue-black like poison.

Erich Maria Remarque

Help when you can; do everything then— but when you can no longer do anything, forget it! Turn away! Pull yourself together. Compassion is meant for quiet times. Not when life is at stake. Bury the dead and devour life! You'll still need it. Mourning is one thing, facts are another. One doesn't mourn less when one sees the facts and accepts them. That is how one survives.

You can't know anything beforehand. The incurable can survive the healthy. Life is a strange phenomenon.

Strange to say, Behm was one of the first to fall. He got hit in the eye during an attack, and we left him lying for dead. We couldn't bring him with us, because we had to come back helter-skelter. In the afternoon suddenly we heard him call, and saw him crawling about in No Man's Land. He had only been knocked unconscious. Because he could not see, and was mad with pain, he failed to keep under cover, and so was shot down

Obuze, mitraliere, aburi de gaze, flotile de tancuri - strivire, devorare, moarte.