Quotes About Survival

We had been together as animals were, desperate and driven by a fierce need

Evan's head was filled with the sound of water. He thought of the ghost in the grass, her blue dress and bare feet. He thought of the way the doves had flown up into the sky all in a rush, startled by gunfire, and then all he could think was that despite everything that happened, he was alive.

She knew that sometimes when you were supposed to feel lucky, all you felt was despair. You were guilty just because you had managed to live. For reasons you couldn't understand, that made no sense whatsoever, you were the one left unscathed.

It was the middle of winter, when the whole world was white, and a wolf and her and her cub had been chased as far as they could go. There was no escape,at least not for both. When the mother wolf ran to attach the hunters, all they saw were her claws and her fangs.While they shot her, the cub disappeared into the snow. That was the moment when it's coat turned from black to white so that is was forever after invisible to the hunters.

Statistics, Jenny had learned early on, never mattered when they applied to you, not if you were the one in a thousand who'd been struck by lightning

Loss does different things to different people. Some fall apart. Some, like the Finder, rebuild. I have done both. I have crawled under my table and refused to come out. I have covered myself with thorns and tattoos. I have planted a garden, reached out to my neighbors, begun to write down my story. Surely, I can never sit in judgment of the lost or the found.

A fish and a sparrow cannot live in the same world. one will gasp for air and the other will drown.

But now he had been forced to learn many skills; how to fix a roof, how to cook, how to steal, how to say goodbye.

The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and wrappers and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the dead have fled?

A human being born into a cold, indifferent world will regard his situation as the only possible one.

Once we realize the immense amount of energy children can summon up in order to survive cruelty and extreme sadism, things suddenly start looking more optimistic. Then it is easy to imagine that our world could be a much better one if those children (like Rimbaud, Schiller, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche) could expend their almost limitless energies on other, more productive ends than merely fighting for their own survival.

This story sounds as though it were invented, but it is true from beginning to end. There are people who have to pay for the smallest things in life with their very substance and their spinal cord. That is a constantly recurring pain, and then when they are tired of suffering. . .

I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself.

And so it often happened with those practical people. In spite of their calculations, their survival instincts, they might not get as far as they had quite reasonably expected. No doubt it seemed unfair.

And so it often happened with those practical people. In spite of their calculations, their survival instincts, they might not get as far as they had quite reasonable expected.

Learning to survive, no matter with what cravenness and caution, what shocks and forebodings, is not the same as being miserable. It is too interesting.

El invierno cae con dureza sobre el campo, se asienta en él como la capa de hielo de tres metros de profundidad hace miles de años. La gente vive envuelta en el invierno de un modo que los extraños no comprenden. Mantienen una actitud precavida, previsora, tranquila, animosa.

I forgive you, I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.

If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.

Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.

Well, as my dad would say, it means she's out of this shithole.

I watched my beautiful sister running . . . and I knew she was not running away from me or toward me. Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.

When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.

memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.