Quotes About Survival

She had lost all that was most precious in her life.

I survived by learning to embrace that black emptiness, and I discovered that actually it was an infinity of light and possibility. I learned that my real self is inner and infinite and indestructible and quite independent of circumstances or labels.

What if love was the one thing that always survived and could carry one through to the other side of suffering?

She did not feel in any mood to playact for a whole evening, but she supposed that she would somehow live through the ordeal.

Even if they found her alive, her life would never be the same. "I hope so.

She was alone and destitute in a world of pointless carnage. By an eight-hundred-year-old Sepahrdic tradition she ad been since the age of twelve and a half bogeret l'reshut nafsha--an adult wit authority over her own soul. The Torah taught, Choose life. And so, rather than die of pride, Sofia Mendes sold what she had to sell, and she survived.

A thousand times, they nearly killed themselves off with political bickering and moral certainty and a lethal distaste for compromise. A thousand times they might have become nothing but a memory in the mind of God.

Not just survival but a good life, full of learning, full of love, Emilio thought, and took a step closer to the death he felt inside himself. He

A thousand times, they nearly killed themselves off with political bickering and moral certainty and a lethal distaste for compromise.

They don't take enough to kill their host, Supaari thought, sorry to have lived through the night, and disgusted by the jointed carapaces, the scuttling gait of the bloated little beasts. They suck blood and give back nothing. That is the way of parasites.

I shared a dorm room with a beautiful neurotic who clung to her beauty as if it were a chance piece of debris keeping her afloat on a violent sea.

The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness.

I exhale a highway of smoke and stare down it, then say, Each day has just been survival, just getting through, standing it. Don't you see how savage that sounds? Like, that's the way men in prison yards think. You live in a rich suburb and teach literature.

If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it. Zora Neale Hurston

PART I Escape from the Tropic of Squalor

A hawk reeled overhead with a rodent squirming in its beak, close enough so you could see the bird's black shiny eyes.

The lady in Chicago survived, she told me, through stories. Which is at the core of traditional therapy: retelling the family saga. Talk about it, the old wisdom says, and you get better. From narratives about childhood, this woman manufactured a self, neither cut off from her past nor mired in it.

She was set on enduring, no matter what.she'd harden into whatever shape survival required.from that second forward, she had to figure what-all she'd have to lose for that survival, what-all and who.

If only one man is left standing, a bribe cannot bite.

Facing the Extreme: Moral life in the concentration camps by Tzvetan Todorov.5 This is a careful study of the moral situation of both prisoners and guards in the German and Russian camps. It shows how much more complex and many-sided that situation was than might have been expected

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

You don't want to hear the story of my life, and anyway I don't want to tell it, I want to listen to the enormous waterfalls of the sun. And anyway it's the same old story - - - a few people just trying, one way or another, to survive. Mostly, I want to be kind. And nobody, of course, is kind, or mean, for a simple reason. And nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world. (from, Dogfish)

and anyway it's just the same old story -- a few people just trying, one way or another, to survive. Mostly, I want to be kind. And nobody, of course, is kind, or mean, for a simple reason. And nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.