Quotes About Survival

Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence," she said reflectively.

Will you agree to be superseded, and start on the way to extinction without a struggle? I do not think you are decadent enough for that.

The way I came to miss the end of the world – well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years – was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it.

A world where a man is able to hunt his fellow man! How could he be called a man?

The living form defies evolution at its peril; if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a sacrilegious myth.

But he survived, that radio announcer. His ship and five others out of the flotilla of ten came through, a bit radioactive, but otherwise unharmed. And I understand that the first thing that happened to him when he reported back to his office after treatment was a reprimand for the use of overcolloquial language which had given offense to a number of listeners by its neglect of the Third Commandment.

I knew in my very heart that I would not be able to sustain myself for long alone.

Knowing makes all the difference... It's the difference between just trying to keep alive, and having something to live for

If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.

There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.

The dove is not a coward to fear the hawk; it is simply wise.

I'm just telling you, Tommy. He wasn't supposed to go and do those things in the war that he had to do. People aren't supposed to murder people. And he did, and he did awful things, and awful things happened to him, and he couldn't live inside himself, Tommy. That's what I'm trying to say. Other men could do it, but he couldn't, it ruined him, and—

They take them from the plants and animals or the elements. Still Waters, Gentle Breeze, pah. Why not Dead Deer, or Rutting Ehat?

I'm so glad I didn't die on the various occasions I have earnestly wished I might, for I would have missed a lot of lovely weather.

Words, as. it happens, sometimes survive the millennia better than material objects, and they do so best in areas in which the culture changed only very slowly - as in the far north, where the intense winter cold discouraged immigrants.

You can't just sit in a corner weeping or you'll die.

Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.

I am in the Special Operations Executive because I can speak French and German and am good at making up stories, and I am a prisoner in the Ormaie Gestapo HQ because I have no sense of direction whatsoever.

How can you grow to love a handful of strangers so fiercely just because you have to sleep on the same couple of wooden planks with them, when half the time you were there you wanted to strangle them, and all you ever talked about is death and imaginary strawberries?

Julie would have died there.

This is what's so heartbreaking: the fact that I am here, alive, has no doubt given Fernande some grain of hope for her daughter. But the fact that I was there makes me sure there isn't any.

That would be a slow and cruel death," said Gebe Meskal quietly. "He may survive a week on such a regime, but so little of a skin is not sufficient water for a man laboring in the desert." Telemakos said through his teeth, "It is for a child.

They eat everything alive. People, dogs, horses. Everything with flesh on it. So many of them crawling. Everywhere. Leaving the bones behind.

That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end.