Quotes About Survival

We lay there with our bodies touching, and as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth around us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.

You save yourself or you remain unsaved

In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky.

Every time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

Nikt nie mo?e wyratowa? drugiego cz?owieka. Ka?dy musi ratowa? si? sam albo jest stracony.

Sometimes cats fall ten flights out of the windows of highrises and land on their feet. You only believe it because you've seen it in print.

In violence, it is the getting away that you concentrate on. When you begin to go over the edge, life receding from you as a boat recedes inevitably from shore, you hold on to death tightly, like a rope that will transport you, and you swing out on it, hoping only to land away from where you are.

Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain.

In moments like this she thought of all the little girls who grew into adulthood and old age as a sort of cipher alphabet for all those who didn't. Their lives would somehow be inextricably attached to all the girls who had been killed.

Try to breathe, he said, and for the first time the only thought in my head after an instruction like that wasn't Fuck you. I breathed.

Like someone who has survived a gun-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.

But I had made contact with a different planet from the one my parents or sister lived on. It was a planet where an act of violence changed your life.

At first the lives of women frightened me. They seemed so fragile, so dependent on fathers and husbands and brothers and lovers. Gradually, though, I noticed how supple their lives were beneath the surface. I saw, too, that sooner or later, by choice or by chance most women faced the task of adapting to a future on their own. When at my most optimistic, I thought of it as independence, in darker moods, as survival. Either way, women had to do it.

I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing.

You got to fight them, Celie, she say. I can't do it for you. You got to fight them for yourself. I don't say nothing. I think bout Nettie, dead. She fight, she run away. What good it do? I don't fight, I stay where I'm told. But I'm alive.

He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don't never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man.

Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.

My heart hurt so much I can't believe it. How can it keep beating, feeling like this?

She sicker than my mama was when she die. But she more evil than my mama and that keep her alive.

It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how I come to know trees fear man.

Ain't nothing wrong with Shug Avery. She just sick. Sicker than anybody I ever seen. She sicker than my mama was when she die. But she more evil than my mama and that keep her alive.

It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man.

When I was a child I read books for entertainment and information; I now think of books as lifeboats.

It seems wiser to do as hermit crabs do, find a shell and inhabit it.