Quotes About Survival

strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed.

Nature red in tooth and claw.' Perhaps she doesn't

he'd probably just crawl in the corner and starve. Like a hamster you forgot to feed.

It could have been a foxhole in the Somme being shelled by the Germans and all that mattered was her next to me in the dark, her arm beside mine.

Yet (moment by painful moment, breath by painful breath) one got through things.

Your brain under stress is focused upon surviving and reacting, and less focused upon planning and creating. With chronic stress, your brain learns—and is rewired—to be focused upon survival and reacting only. It has difficulty amping up the area devoted to devising plans for the future. Constant time urgency takes a toll on your body, brain, and emotions. Here

Death had brushed hard against him

The worsening context of the war, which threatened the survival of the Union and the Constitution itself, provided a suitable resolution to this dilemma.

If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven't. So with men.

flour and lumber." The entire settlement consisted of a few hundred people, fifteen log cabins, a tavern, a church, a blacksmith, a schoolmaster, a preacher, and a

Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

That's what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable.

We're back at the blade of grass again, that will press up through the bits of rusted steel a thousand years after the bombs have exploded and the world's crust has melted. Because the force of will in the blade of grass is the same as the small painful endurance.

SLEEP, for you are not yet dead.

That's what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable…

To persuade the consumer, the creators of ads needed to touch people's basic, unchanging instincts—their "obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of their own.

I could not stand it, neither the words on the page nor what they told me about myself. My neck and teeth began to ache, and I was not at all sure I really wanted to live with that stuff inside me. But holding onto them, reading them over again, became a part of the process of survival, of deciding once more to live--and clinging to that decision.

I want the society in which I live to be clear about the reality of our families; to know all the ways in which we avoid the issues of violence, abuse, and societal contempt; and to see survivors as more than victims. If we know more about what it means to survive abuse, we will be better able to help those still caught in the whole shameful secret world of physical and sexual violence.

Let me tell you a story. I tell stories to prove I was meant to survive, knowing it is not true.

Stories open the door to the darkened room. Language can carry us past the horror to the sense of purpose in a life that refuses to surrender to that darkness.

In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster.

I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys.

I became convinced that to survive I would have to remake the world so that it came closer to matching its own ideals.

Both of us had grown up believing that being beaten is normal, that being backhanded is ordinary, that being called names is a regular part of life. That everyone does it, that they just don't talk about it in public.