Quotes About Survival

Erich Maria Remarque

We forget nothing really . . . the front-line days . . . are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once. If we did, we should have been destroyed long ago . . . - terror . . . kills, if a man thinks about it.

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by war.

I soon found out this much:--terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;--but it kills, if a man thinks about it.

We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down - now for the first time in three days we can see his face, now for the first time in three days we can oppose him . . . No longer do we lie helpless . . . we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged.

We became hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough-- and that was good; for these attributes were just what we lacked. Had we gone into the trenches without this period of training most of us would certainly have gone mad. Only thus were we prepared for what awaited us.

Die Schwierigkeit mit dem Krieg ist, dass die Leute, die ihn wollen, nicht erwarten, in ihm zu sterben. Und die Schwierigkeit mit unserer Erinnerung ist, dass sie vergisst und verändert und verfälscht, um zu überleben. Sie macht den Tod zu einem Abenteuer, wenn der Tod dich verfehlt. Aber der Tod ist kein Abenteuer: Töten ist der Sinn des Krieges, - nicht Überleben.

We find one man who has held the artery of his arm in his teeth for two hours in order not to bleed to death.

Sonra da yerimizi deÄŸiÅŸtiriyor ve ka??t oynamak üzere bir baÅŸka yere postu seriyoruz. Çünkü yapabileceÄŸimiz üç iÅŸ var: Ka??t oynamak, küfretmek ve savaÅŸmak. Yirmi yaÅŸ için pek fazla say?lmaz. Ya da pek fazla...

Üçümüz de ayn? ÅŸeyi düÅŸünüyoruz: Franz Kemmerich buradan saÄŸ ç?ksa bile tek bacakl? kalaca??na göre bu çizmeler ne iÅŸe yarar?

Aber niemand hat uns in der Schule beigebracht, wie man bei Regen und Sturm eine Zigarette anzündet, wie man ein Feuer aus nassem Holz machen kann - oder dass man ein Bajonett am besten in den Bauch stösst, weil es da nicht festklemmt wie bei den Rippen.

Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby battledress, roasting a goose in the middle of the night. We don't talk much, but we have a greater and more gentle consideration for each other than I should think even lovers do. We are two human beings, two tiny sparks of life; outside there is just the night, and all around us, death.

Vis gal?jai tik?tis, kad tav?s nepasteb?s arba palaikys mirusiu - papras?iausias gamtos d?snis, žinomas kiekvienam vabalui.

When he presses himself to the earth, long and violently, when he urges himself deep into it with his face and his limbs, under fire and with the fear of death upon him, then the earth is his only friend, his brother, he groans out his terror and screams into its silence and safety, the earth absorbs it all and gives him another ten seconds of life, ten seconds to run, then takes hold of him again - sometimes for ever.

I merely crawl still farther under the coffin, it shall protect me, though death himself lies in it, (Chapter 4, All Quiet on the Western Front)

Passengers were crushed by descending boats. Swimmers were struck by chairs, boxes, potted plants, and other debris falling from the decks high above. And then there were those most ill-starred of passengers, who had put on their life preservers incorrectly and found themselves floating with their heads submerged, legs up, as in some devil's comedy.

If you had to jump six or seven feet or certainly drown, it's surprising how far even older people will jump.

One young boy, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, a fireman or pilot or such, answered: Alive.

Of the four men in Preston Prichard's cabin, D-90, only one survived, his friend Arthur Gadsden. Prichard's body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard's letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world.

I always thought a shipwreck was a well-organized affair, but I've learned the devil a lot in the last five minutes.

Seagulls dove among corpses and survivors alike. Turner later told his son, Norman, that he found himself fending off attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floating corpses. Rescuers later reported that wherever they saw spirals of gulls, they knew they would find bodies. Turner's experience left him with such a deep hatred of seagulls, according to Norman, "that until his retirement he used to carry a .22 rifle and shoot every seagull he could.

Once, at the dawn of a very dark time, an American father and daughter found themselves suddenly transported from their snug home in Chicago to the heart of Hitler's Berlin. They remained there for four and a half years, but it is their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided with Hitler's ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung in the balance

One woman, Margaret Gwyer, a young newlywed from Saskatoon, Canada, was sucked into one of the ship's 24-foot-wide funnels. Moments later an eruption of steam from below shot her back out, alive but covered in black soot.

had had enough of blood and terror to last me for the rest of my life.