Quotes About Survival

Without shelter, we stand in daylight.

It was pretty clear there would be no stopping the Bullhorn, or someone like him. Here was the earthquake, the fire, flood, and melting permafrost, with everyone still grabbing for bricks to put in their pockets rather than walking out of the wreck and looking for light

She kept her ears permanently tuned to the chicken voices outside, so knew immediately when a coyote had crept into the yard, and barreled screaming for the front door before the rest of us had a clue. (I don't know about the coyote, but I nearly needed CPR.) These hens owed their lives and eggs to Lily, there was no question.

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it's a feeling you keep having, even after that's no longer a place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn't any food left on the planet, you'd still keep feeling hungry too.

Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.

Sex will get you through times with no money better than money will get you through times with no sex.

on her Amish friends]I do know this family has borne losses and grief, just like the rest of us. But if they are generally content, must such a life inevitably be dismissed as mythical, or else merely quaint? ... It sounds like a community type that went extinct a generation ago. But it didn't, not completely. If a self-sufficient farming community has survived here, it remains a possibility elsewhere.

Man against Nature...Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.

The rule of fishes is the same as the rule of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten. They share a single jumpy heart that drives them to move all together, running away from danger just before it arrives. Somehow they know. Underneath

I've seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The "free-range vegetarian hens" testimony on an egg-carton label is perjury, unless someone's trained them with little shock collars.)

She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they're asked.

Engineered genes don't play by the rules that have organized life for three billion years (or, if you prefer, 4,004). And in this case, winning means loser takes all.

When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.

First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.

In the scullery kitchens and probably the salt mines of this world, many a child is not so much raised as hammered into shape, Artie. To be of use. Surviving by the grace of utility alone.

through the woods. Big Bear. I heard him fall

The leopards will walk upright like men on our paths. The snakes will come out of the ground and seek our houses instead of hiding in their own.

Both of us were spared, in body at least, by the stone walls of our different imprisonments, and altered in spirit, in ways we're still struggling to understand.

This is darkest Africa, where life roars by you like a flood and you grab whatever looks like it will hold you up.

I'm going to tell you something, there's country poor, and there's city poor. No desperate [man in the city] ever went out and shot venison if they were hungry. they shot liquor store cashiers. Living in the big woods made of steel and cement, without cash, is a hungrier life than I knew how to think about.

What's with everybody always trying to get rid of the Indians? I said, not really asking for an answer. I thought again of the history-book pictures. Astronomers and brain surgeons. They should have done brain surgery on Columbus while they had the chance.

If fight or flight is the choice, it's way easier to fly.

Without shelter, we stand in daylight." "Without shelter, we feel ourselves likely to die.

There is nothing boring about the prospect of extinction.