Quotes About Survival

but wait till it happens to you! The ack-ack guns make so much noise you can't hear your own voice.

begin with, will be used up too quickly and I won't have any left by the time the war is over. Yours

The house shook and the bombs kept falling. I was clutching my "escape bag," more because I wanted to have something to hold on to than because I wanted to run away.

The weak shall fall and the strong shall survive and not be defeated.

I don't know where to start, one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.

He had the time to hear, like a person who believed there was someone alive beneath the rubble of herself, who heard the soft sounds she could still make from the broken parts that had waited decades to be missed.

There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable.

Living on earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

you're instantly in a bind once you arrive here on earth, of need, self-will, a body and a separate personality, even before teh crippling self-consciousness kicks in, even before the seventh grade ... you're fucked at cell division ... it's all downhill from there. After that, it's all survival, and trying to keep yourself either entertained or convinced that the things you're obsessed with are of any importance at all in the big scheme.

You weren't born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose - paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.

my disease wanted me dead, but would settle for getting me drunk...

Books! To fling myself into a book, to be carried away to another world while being at my most grounded, on my butt or in my bed or favorite chair, is a literally how I have survived being here at all. Someone else is doing the living for me, and all I have to do is let their stories, humor, knowledge, and images – some of which I'll never forget – flow through me, even as I forget to turn off the car when I arrive at my destination.

Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O'Connor said that anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done.

Books! To fling myself into a book, to be carried away to another world while being at my most grounded, on my butt or in my bed or favorite chair, is literally how I have survived being here at all.

It's stunning, how a great trauma can also be so ordinary.

For people like me, the fight-or-flight instinct comes out in the desperate desire to fix, people-please, and create harmony.

I also learned that you didn't come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren't born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose--paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.

Man is wise to fear: it sharpens the sense of self-preservation.

When the tiger executes a merger with the goat, which one walks away?

Mankind has a history of forgetting the unpleasant, the undesirable. Bu ignoring its existence, it can make the source of past Terror disappear.

To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?

They waited until I was asleep, then roused themselves, exhausted as swimmers, grey between the empty trees. Their hair in tufts, open sores where ears used to be, grubs twisting from their chests. The grotesque remains of incomplete lives, the embodied complexities of desires eternally denied.

When you are alone -- at sea, in the polar dark -- an absence can keep you alive.

She understood very clearly why people go mad. Sometimes it is the only way to survive the unbearable when all other flight has been cut off. When the body cannot remove itself and emotions cannot be deadened, then the mind simply refuses to accept reality.