Quotes About Survival

We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can

We observe small rites, but we defend ourselves against that terrible memory that is stronger than will. We defend ourselves from the rooms, the scenes, the objects that make for hallucination, that make the senses start up and fasten upon a ghost. We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

The most we can hope is to go on getting away with it till the others get it away from us

Better to be rooted out hurt, bleeding, alive, like the daisies from the turf, than blow faintly away across the lawn like a straw.

To remember can be at times no more than a cold duty, for we remember only in the limited way that is bearable. We observe small rites, but we defend ourselves against that terrible memory that is stronger than will. We defend ourselves from the rooms, the scenes, the objects that make for hallucination, that make the senses start up and fasten upon a ghost. We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

People would eat a boot if it was home made.

Maybe killing comes naturally to people, an instinct nobody likes to admit, a survival reflex inherited from our Neanderthal cousins. So maybe it's the other stuff, the good manners that supposedly make us human, that are the real aberrations.

In 1942, somebody came back to our village from Treblinka. His name was Spivak, he escaped by hiding in a wagon full of clothing. He described what was going on there, and said he got crazy from what he had seen. We didn't believe him, we didn't believe in the crematoria. We thought he was a madman telling an unbelievable tale. How could such a thing be happening in our world, our modern world?

There was one pharmacist in town, a Polish man. He was a friend of my father. I risked my life to go to him for medicine. Two, three times a week, I took off my armband and went. If the Germans would have seen me they would have shot me. I told the pharmacist I couldn't pay, I had no money. He said, "Miriam, take it and go.

How arrogant we are to think the survival of any life that begins in our shadow depends upon our continuing physical presence. Indeed our shadow too often stands between the new life we create- in whatever form- and the sun's life-giving rays.

And we have a little herb garden, which survived the winter thanks to global warming. It makes me feel like a cool, old Italian housewife, that I kept my rosemary alive outside all winter.

Many waters cannot quench love' was said of divine, not human, love, which the Dean knew was not always tough enough to survive the indifference of misery. That was one of the chief reasons why he struggled to do away with misery.

Love. The only indestructible thing. The only wealth and the only reality. The only survival. At the end of it all there was nothing else

You'd have to be so careful, more careful than we can even imagine, to keep that one spark alive. Because that's what kept you alive, in the cold and the dark.

Shh," he whispered. "You asked me if I loved you. I do. I love you more than life itself. Nothing matters in this world but that you live. Can you do that for me? Can you live?

The basements of the churches I've loved reveal the foundation of the spiritual life to be not belief so much as engagement with the mystery lurking at the base of all things. We build a framework on top of mystery because we need someplace to live, some manner of surviving nature's fury and our mundane daily needs.

If people had to spend all of every day getting enough food to eat like animals, they wouldn't have time to make aeroplanes or bombs.

Of the many species that have existed on earth--estimates run as high as fifty billion--more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error. more than a rounding error.

We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

Basically, if you were a triceratops in Alberta, you had about two minutes before you got vaporized" is how one geologist put it to me.

Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long.

Everything (and everyone) alive today is descended from an organism that somehow survived the impact. But it does not follow from this that they (or we) are any better adapted. In times of extreme stress, the whole concept of fitness, at least in a Darwinian sense, loses its meaning: how could a creature be adapted, either well or ill, for conditions it has never before encountered in its entire evolutionary history?

Only in a place where the rules of the game remain fixed is there time for butterflies to evolve to feed on the shit of birds that evolved to follow ants.

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species". (...) We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.