Quotes About Survival

My books have been part of my life forever. They have been good soldiers, boon companions. Every book has survived numerous purges over the years; each book has repeatedly been called onto the carpet and asked to explain itself. I own no book that has not fought the good fight, taken on all comers, and earned the right to remain. If a book is there, it is there for a reason.

Genes aren't designed to make us happy. They design us to make more copies of themselves.

Hominids are all the Neanderthals, australopithecines, Homo habili, Homo erecti, etc., the upright-walking apes of which we are the only surviving species.

We broke and ran. The squirrel, however, was not a quitter. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that it was in fact gaining on us, and Leonard's cussing was having absolutely no effect, other than to perhaps further enrage the animal, who might have had Baptist leanings. We

I didn't suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry that I'd soon end up with worse things happening than had already come upon us or that I'd take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big angry hog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that's exactly how it was.

Certainly there were gars in there that had bitten children and pulled swimming dogs under for their afternoon meals. They didn't call the big ones alligator gar for nothing. Six feet long, lean and vicious, they were the barracudas of fresh water, beasts with angry racial memories of lost prehistoric seas. And

A moment later, she and The Little Guy disappear into the trees. I didn't know exactly what was going on. I thought maybe she was going to eat him in privacy, because it had crossed my mind to do just that. There wouldn't have been a lot of preparation and very little hair to spit out. Just swing him by the feet, whack him on a rock, and a hot dinner was served.

Breathing the air was like swallowing broken glass.

Killing ain't no good thing, son, unless it's to eat or protect yourself. And you ought never to delight in it.

The snow wasn't deep - in many places its crust was firm enough that they actually walked on top of it - but the wind was surgical, a precision instrument with needles for teeth, and it found even the tiniest exposed places on her skin, attacking them.

The only thing that didn't seem to belong here was the hospital room itself. It would have been more appropriately suited to someone who was actually fighting for his life, or at least trying to get well. My eyes kept going back to the Post headline running in huge capital letters above the aerial photo of our house, or what had been our house, blasted to pieces and burned to the ground. Blown away.

I'm just saying—" He pointed the way that Han appeared to be favoring. "—this doesn't feel right." "Yeah, well, we're on a Star Destroyer, being chased by the living dead. None of this feels right.

Yet here I am, Zahara thought now, queen of her own miniature kingdom, after all, duchess of the empty bunks, and our lady of the perpetual stomachache. Involuntary lust-object of a hundred emotionally frustrated prison guards and deprived stormtroopers. Dispenser of medicine, charged with keeping the inmates of the Imperial Prison Barge Purge alive long enough to be permanently detained on some remote prison moon.

The minute I knew help was at hand something had collapsed inside me. Whatever had been holding me together had gone. Now I could not think for myself, let alone crawl! There was nothing to fight for, no patterns to follow, no voice, and it frightened me to think that, without these, I might run out of life.

Have them drop their pants. Then we will know who is a kike and who is not." It took only a moment, but soon all the men were standing, their bodies trembling, their knees shaking. One by one, they removed their underwear. Von Strassen shone his flashlight at their private parts. Three were found to be circumcised—a father, his teenage son, and his six-year-old son. "Away with them," Von Strassen spat. "Send them to Auschwitz.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.

Farms and food production should be, I submit, at least as important as who pierced their navel in Hollywood this week. Please tell me I'm not the only one who believes this. Please. As a culture, we think we're well educated, but I'm not sure that what we've learned necessarily helps us survive.

Was uns nicht umbringt, bewirkt nur, dass wir sterben wollen.

When answering the question "Who won?" "Peter. Damn mutant cyborg. He can run the fastest. I guess that's a good thing, since when people are trying to blow you up or put bullets in your ass, being fast is important." Lucas in Controlled Response

It was a tough night," Marcus said briefly, another humorless smile crossing his mouth. "But they got what they paid for." "Jesus," Thomas murmured. Marcus slanted a glance at him, and his green eyes were hard, brittle. "Don't think about it, pet. I don't. No one who lives it dwells on this fucking stuff. You just thank God or your own balls for getting yourself through it, pulling yourself up into something better. The day I see pity in your face, I want your fucking ass out of my life.

A child born today is more likely to reach retirement age than his forebears were to live to their fifth birthday.

Addiction is an adaptation. It's not you—it's the cage you live in.

At the start of the Second World War, the English poet W. H. Auden—when he looked out over the new technologies of destruction that had been created by humans—warned: "We must love one another, or die.

The vitally important corollary is that evolution shaped us not only to feel bad in isolation, but to feel insecure." It's a beautiful theory.