Quotes About Survival

A place with no handholds,no landmarks,no past at all:That would have been too much like dying

In the desert there is no sign that says, 'Thou shalt not eat stones.

Nothing wrecks your nails like a lethal pandemic plague

Attack, voracious eating, and flight: it's a sound routine for staying alive on edges.

But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is

There were places you didn't want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive. But all of that was pertinent only in the night, and had nothing to do with the man you loved, at least in daylight.

But I like my stories to be true to life, which means there have to be wolves in them. Wolves in one form or another.

Every breath we inhale comes from nature; kill it and we kill ourselves.

After we're gone the work of our knives will survive us.

I remember adapt," says Toby. "It was another way of saying tough luck. To people you weren't going to help

You can't couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinitely. Homo sapiens doesn't seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He's one of the few species that doesn't limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words – and up to a point, of course – the less we eat, the more we fuck.

But not, surely, for the first time in human history. How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. The dead bodies evaporating like slow smoke; their loved and carefully tended homes crumbling away like deserted anthills. Their bones reverting to calcium; night predators

Why interesting and important? Because women are interesting and important in real life. They are not an afterthought of nature, they are not secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known that. Without women capable of giving birth, human populations will die out. That is why the mass rape and murder of women, girls, and children has long been a feature of genocidal wars, and of other campaigns meant to subdue and exploit a population.

It's all about sex and territory, which are what will finish us off in the long run.

Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot.

The SanctuCare women went over and welcomed them and said, "You're here now, it's all right," and the Gilead women started to cry. At the time I thought, Why cry, you should be happy, you got out. But after all that's happened to me since that day, I understand why. You hold it in, whatever it is, until you can make it through the worst part. Then, once you're safe, you can cry all the tears you couldn't waste time crying before.

It was love, after all, that rubbed the skins from their gray cheeks, crippled their fingers, snarled their hair, brown or dull gold. Hate would merely have smashed them.

a young woman in desperate financial straits, with no visible relations and no nest egg or trust fund or fallback. People would shake their heads — a shame but what could you do, and at least she had something of marketable value, namely her young ass, and therefore she wouldn't starve to death, and nobody had to feel guilty.

I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There's a lot that doesn't bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last.

The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances.

The instinct to soothe, to make it better. There there, she'd say, as he woke from a nightmare. Things are so hard for you. All this she would have believed, because otherwise how could she have kept on living?

He wouldn't have much of a life out there, picking through garbage dumps and fighting off scavengers, but at least he'd be in charge of himself again.

Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first.

since his paycheck barely sustained him. As he wryly observed, "the last twenty-nine days of the month were the hardest.