Quotes About Survival

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled. Marie-Laure still cannot wear shoes that are too large, or smell a boiled turnip, without experiencing revulsion. Neither can she listen to lists of names. Soccer team rosters, citations at the end of journals, introductions at faculty meetings – always they seem to her some vestige of the prison lists that never contained her father's name.

How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live?

They sleep despite noise, despite cold, despite hunger, as though desperate to stay removed from the waking world for as long as possible.

In the scullery she says, if the end of the world is upon them, they might as well finish all the wine.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

When lightning strikes at sea, why don't all the fish die?

It is the rarest thing...that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different!" Dr. Geffard pronounces this almost gleefully and pours wine into his glass, and she imagines his head as a cabinet filled with ten thousand little drawers.

The dead are gone and so their power over the living is only temporary. You lose sleep, you lose appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat - you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilt about that, that he went on living... p 115

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different!

You lose sleep, you lose your appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat - you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilty about that, that he went on living, eating tomato sandwiches, going to Iditarod Days with his father, making snowballs, when his mother could not.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled.

Humans are best understood as exterminators, he says. Every habitat we enter, we decimate, and now we have overrun the earth. The next thing we exterminate will be ourselves.

Number 4: the tall, derelict bird's nest of a house owned by her great-uncle Etienne. Where she has lived for four years. Where she kneels on the sixth floor alone, as a dozen American bombers roar toward her.

Aethon," says Olivia. "The fool you were telling us about. In the story? Even though he keeps going the wrong way, keeps getting turned into the wrong thing, he never gives up. He survives." Zeno looks at her, some new understanding seeping into his consciousness.

Thermal scanners? Laser sights? Above the junipers, a trio of blue lights hover: some kind of remote-controlled drone. These, the creatures we have chosen to repopulate the earth.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different!" Dr. Geffard pronounces

Anthony Doerr

As if every living thing rushes to establish a foothold before some cataclysm arrives.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct

When lightning strikes the sea, why don't all the fish die?

this summer scientists announced that in the last 40 yrs humans have killed 60 percent of the wild mammals and fishes and birds on earth. Is that fun? Also in the past 30 yrs, we melted 95 percent of the oldest thickest ice in the arctic.

Before she turns fourteen, every person she knows will be either enslaved or dead.

And in our tale of Noah and the ship of books, can you guess what is the flood?" She shakes her head. "Time. Day after day, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world. The manuscript you brought us before? That was written by Aelian, a learned man who lived at the time of the Caesars. For it to reach us in this room, in this hour, the lines within it had to survive a dozen centuries. A scribe had to copy it, and a second