Quotes About Survival

Could you people stop trying to come up with novel ways to kill me for just ONE HOUR? Or maybe the rest of the night? I would SO like that. Just the rest of the night. Just sit down. Just stop doing anything. Sit down and wait sensibly. Earth, water, air, fire - you're running out of elements here!

Only five days on this benighted world, and already total strangers are trying to kill me. Sadly, it wasn't even a record.

If people were too sensible, the human race might well come to an end. Evolution favored the maximum production of children, not of happiness. So how did you end up with neither?

What do you think, my lord Castillar?" Cazaril swallowed. "I think…I think if you lent me a razor now, for me to cut my throat with, it would save ever so many steps. Please Your Grace." The Provincara snorted. "Good, Cazaril, good. I do so like a man who doesn't underestimate his situation.

Suicide wasn't an option for me anymore, I found. Not like good old adolescent angst. I'm no longer of the secret opinion that death will somehow overlook me if I don't do something about it.

Who has the time to become politically active, or even politically aware, when one is struggling just to stay alive and feed one's children?

With the opposable thumb our ancestors made weapons, harnessed fire, fashioned tools and implements, created works of art, and hitch-hiked.

He could hope for many things, though he had stopped doing so long ago. If one didn't hope, then disappointment didn't visit. Hoping meant you had somehting to live for, and living for something or someone else was asking for pain. -Nik

If we were perfect, we'd be Wolves, right?

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.

MAMA Well, little boys' hides ain't as tough as Southside roaches. You better get over there behind the bureau. I seen one marching out of there like Napoleon yesterday.

Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured.

Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the insane tended to give off a palpable, vibrating allure, a kind of animal magnetism that kept them loved by someone. How else could they survive at all? Someone had to hide them from the authorities! Hence the necessity and prevalence of sex appeal for people who were wild and on the edge.

I felt nothing like a horse, whose instincts I knew were to run and run. I had mostly in life tried to stand still like a glob of coral so as not to be spotted by sharks. But now I had crawled out onto land and was somehow already a horse.

Every family is a family of alligators.

Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.

The trick to flying safely, Zoe always said, was to never buy a discount ticket and to tell yourself you had nothing to live for anyway, so that when the plane crashed it was no big deal. Then, when it didn't crash, when you had succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.

Then, when it didn't crash, when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.

If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.

I'm the one who feeds the lions their raw meat.

Those who are nurtured best, survive best.

Those who are nurtured best survive best. It turns out that our emotional resilience and our ability to learn are inextricably interwoven.

There comes a point in life where each one of us who survives begins to feel like a ghost that has forgotten to die at the right time

a few sagging houses whose stones had lost their mortar and were held together only by gravity and habit