Quotes About Survival

The parents insisted on denial as a tactic. Not science denial exactly - they were liberals. It was more a denial of reality. A few had sent us to survival camps, where the fortunate learned to tie knots. Troubleshoot engines, even sterilize stagnant water without chemical filters. But most of them had a simple attitude: business as usual.

He stood pressed against the inside wall of the cupboard, clutching his knife, rigid with terror, but defiant.

I'd rather lose her from my life, but know she was alive and well than lose her altogether to death.

What the hell," he breathed "There are worse things than being a sex slave

Do not expect me to apologize for going what I had to, to survive. A lion doesn't feel guilty for eating a zebra.

But when it comes to questions of meaning, purpose, and death, secondhand information will not do. I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God. There has to be a personal word, a unique confrontation, if I am to come alive.25

It is hardly remarkable that we sicken and die; what is truly remarkable is that we don't usually sicken very often and we don't die very quickly. We can therefore say the same thing about physical disorders that we said about mental disorders: There is a force, the mechanism of which we do not fully understand, that seems to operate routinely in most people to protect and encourage their physical health even under the most adverse conditions.

The one thing I am now sure of is that if there is such a thing as destiny, it is a result of our passion, be that for money, power, or love. Passion, for better or worse. It can keep a soul alive even if all that survives is a shimmering. I've even seen it. I've been bathed in it. I've been changed by it.

Quem escapa do perigo vive a vida com outra intensidade.

A onça mata o novilho porque o raciocínio da onça é que ela deve viver, e se o novilho é tenro tanto melhor: eis o estatuto universal.

Necessity is what impels men to take action, and once necessity is gone, only rot and decay are left

And there's no getting around the fact that all life lives at the expense of another life.

A life form which can't adapt doesn't last very long.

It's a lot simpler to adapt to low gravity, or no atmosphere, or even sandstorms than it is to hustle inhabitants.

adaptable of plants, being able to thrive in a wide range of climates from subtropical California to the deep-freezer

For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences.

To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.

The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity.

In winter, the lazy man freezes to death.

Our mind, faced with a life-threatening situation, drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with. Sound and memory and broader social understanding are sacrificed in favor of heightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us.

Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived.

A few years later, she deliberately drove her car into a river—then, in typical fashion, wrote a poem about it: And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three.

Si te salvas por los pelos, quedas traumatizado. Si te salvas holgadamente, piensas que eres invencible.

I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense; I call it intelligence.