Quotes About Survival

Even gold is worth less than bread

He noticed that a bedraggled and desiccated pink poppy was growing out of a crack where the wall of the teacher's house intersected with the cobbles of the street.

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

If you have been embroiled in a war in which you confidently expected to die, what were you supposed to do with so much life unexpectedly left over? There were so many ways of passing the peace, and you would never know what they would have been like, those roads not taken.

Love itself is what is left over, when being being in love has burned away.

Agora, eu ia arrastado, nesta fuga em massa, para a morte em comum, para o fogo… Isto vinha das profundezas mais recônditas e tinha acontecido.

This here's a hard country. If a man ain't fit, he can't last - Kilkenny

To survive? What is that? A mouse lives, a fly lives; one flees in terror, another lives in filth. They exist, they are, but do they live?

Hardy had learned in a hard school, where the tests are given by savage Indians, by bitter cold, by hunger. These were tests where the result was not just a bad mark if one failed. The result was a starved or frozen body somewhere, forgotten in the wilderness.

They were four desperate men, made hard by life, cruel by nature, and driven to desperation by imprisonment.

Somebody comin', he said softly. Five or six, maybe. His words were spoken over an empty fire, for each of us vanished ghostlike into the surrounding darkness. I, fortunately, had the presence of mind to retain my coffee. With the Ferguson rifle in my right hand, I drank coffee from the cup in my left.

Well, I've often been wrong, but this time I was right and they had to pay mind to me or bury me, and mine is a breed that dies hard.

The buzzard could not reason but he knew the patterns that led to food. His entire life was built upon such fragments of knowledge and he knew that where such groups of men rode, death rode with them.

The more ill-prepared people are to face trouble, the more likely they are to revert to savagery against each other.

We Sackett boys never killed anything we didn't need to eat unless it was coming at us. A mountain man tries to live with the country instead of against it.

The buzzards were neutral. No matter who won down there, they would win. They had but to wait.

For our age-old enemies await us always, just beyond our thin walls. Hunger, thirst, and cold lie waiting there, and forever among us are those who would loot, rape, and maim rather than behave as civilized men. If we sit secure this hour, this day, it is because the thin walls of the law stand between us and evil. A jolt of the earth, a revolution, an invasion or even a violent upset in our own government can reduce all to chaos, leaving civilized man naked and exposed.

There are folks who can't abide camp-robber jays, but I take to them. Often enough they've been my only company for days at a time, and they surely do get friendly. They'll steal your grub right from under your nose, but who I am to criticize the lifestyle of a bird? He has his ways, I have mine. Like I say, I take to them.

The trees are aware, and the bushes. The birds and small animals are aware, and they listen, hesitant, suspecting. Awareness of danger is an element of their being. It is like their breathing, like the blood in their veins, and one who lives much with the wilderness become so aware, too... Half of woodcraft is attention, and all of survival.

From The Skull and the Arrow : The man went on until he saw the dark opening of a cave. He turned to it for shelter then, as men have always done. Though there are tents and wickiups, halls and palaces, in his direst need man always returns to the cave.

sleep whenever there was time and to eat when there was food.

The desert was a school, a school where each day, each hour, a final examination was offered, where failure meant death and the buzzards landed to correct the papers.

Men may plan, they may dream and struggle, but the buzzard has only to wait, for all things come to him in the end.

You will leave here at daybreak and you will leave alone. He smiled, showing a fine set of white, even teeth. And if I do not choose to? Bodies do not lie long upon the ground. The coyotes dispose of them.