Quotes About Survival

You are special. You are meant to survive, to go on and do great things.

I feel like I should be over it by now," he says. "Everyone else has forgotten about the flight. Mostly, anyway. But I feel like I still think about it all the time." ... "What happened is baked into your bones, Edward. It lives under your skin. It's not going away. It's part of you and will be part of you every moment until you die. What you've been working on, since the first time I met you, is learning to live with that.

Edward swallows. Like a dutiful student, he follows her train of thought. Voldemort equals plane crash. Dead parents equal dead parents. Harry equals him.

Ann Napolitano

As I write these recollections of women who survived, I hope my readers are taking careful note of why they did. They screamed. They fought. They slammed doors in a stranger's face. They ran. They doubted glib stories. They spotted flaws in those stories. They were lucky enough to have someone step up and protect them.

He was a shadow man, fighting to survive in a world that was never made for him.

The most basic bit of advice given to women who have to walk alone at night is, 'Look alert. Be aware of your surroundings and walk briskly. You will be safer if you know where you are going, and if anyone who observes you senses that.' The stalking, predatory animal cuts the weakest from the pack, and then kills at his leisure.

But now you can't find me or reach me or hurt me ever again and once I tell the words I am going to kick you off my porch and learn to breathe again.

My curiosity about this country intensified…and so I went. I discovered that, like all canyons, they have a powerful sense of direction and this becomes imprinted upon one's way of thinking: there are upcanyon and downcanyon, and one adjusts to that simple fact. More than anywhere else I sensed that here one must fit into the landscape, must know what is there and where, in order to survive. These canyons, like the ocean and the air, are unforgiving.

In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody "identified" me . . . and whispered in my ear . . . "Can you describe this?" And I said: "Yes, I can."

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me… and asked me in a whisper… "Can you describe this?" And I said: "I can."

All my contemporaries— hundred-and-fivers or convicts— will tell you how we lived in barely sentient fear, raising children for the executioner, prison, or the torture chamber.

And so the decades file by, torture, Deportations, executions. Sing — You see... I can't

Ahora sé cómo se desvanecen los rostros, cómo bajo los párpados anida el terror, cómo el dolor traza en las mejillas rudas páginas cuneiformes, cómo unos rizos cenicientos y negros se tornan plateados de repente, la sonrisa se marchita en los labios dóciles y en una risa seca tiembla el pavor. y no sólo por mí rezo, sino por quienes permanecieron allí conmigo, en el frío feroz y en el infierno de Julio, bajo el muro rojo y ciego

Even now I cannot believe that I am still alive and writing this account of the emperor's death. I put my hands to my eyes, wondering if what I am relating here is not all a dream - or maybe it is not a dream: perhaps it is a delusion and I am mad, the victim of some extraordinary and monstrous hallucination. How comes it that when he is dead I am still numbered among the living?

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.

Many people withdrew into what they called 'internal emigration'. They sheltered their secret inner lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities.

Life is stronger than you are, even when you deny it, even when you neglect it, even when you refuse to admit it.

They've all been against me, ever since I can remember, even when I was six years old. What sort of human beings are these, who can be inhuman to a child of six? How can I help hating them all? Sometimes they disgust me so much that I feel I can't go on living among them - that I must escape from the loathsome creatures swarming like maggots all over the earth.

It seemed to me we were fighting against the ice, which was all the while coming steadily nearer, covering more of the world with its dead silence, its awful white peace. By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe.

We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations.

This book argues that staying alive—for every species—requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die.

People and trees are caught in irreversible histories of disturbance. But some kinds of disturbance have been followed by regrowth of a sort that nurtures many lives.

First, all that taming and mastering has made such a mess that it is unclear whether life on earth can continue.