Quotes About Survival

Many had tried their best with us, but we came out of too-hungry mothers. Four demons spawned by four different starving hearts.

I am not one to argue with wild mushroomers who claim the distinction of being still alive.

of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.

Like a little blue prizefighter. Those are the words she'd use later on, being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom's life. And if that's how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I'll take it. To me that says I had a fighting chance.

today and I thought of those movies in which a town is wiped clean of its

Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There's no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.

For some, a lousy day's work will get you yelled at. For farmers, it's live or die.

They wait out the dry months kind of dead-like, just like everything else, and when the rain comes they wake up and crawl out of the ground and start to holler.

Plenty of people took this way out, looking future damage in the eye and naming it something else.

If you're standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.

From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.

The tree was intact, not cut or broken by wind. What a waste. After maybe centuries of survival it had simply let go of the ground, the wide fist of its root mass ripped up and resting naked above a clay gash in the wooded mountainside. Like herself, it just seemed to have come loose from its station in life.

It struck me what a wide world of difference there was between our sort of games—"Mother May I?," "Hide and Seek"—and his: "Find Food," "Recognize Poisonwood," "Build a House.

Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom.

On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals.

My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There's no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.

She needs some proof that she isn't the last woman left on earth, the surviving queen of nothing.

But he went right back to it, trying again. He would do this over and over until he had it, and today or tomorrow he would walk. Willa remembered all this. She'd watched her kids master these first small tasks with an application of effort that seemed superhuman, but of course it only amounted to being human, a story written in genes. First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.

One-fourth of humanity must be eliminated from the social body. We are in charge of God's selection process for planet Earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death.

in! 'Cause I saw her do that to a roach before! And she is excellent at it!

make money. To keep myself

Emma had not yet come to understand that when hope is taken away from a man he is left with nothing, sometimes not even the will to live. And all the hope had been kicked out of Jack Harte long ago.

They must have more money if they were to survive, if her mother was to regain her strength and her health. Emma knew that without money you were nothing, just a powerless and oppressed victim of the ruling class, a yoked and shackled beast of burden destined to a life of mindless drudgery, and an existence so wretched and so without hope, so filled with terror and despair that it was hardly worth the contemplation let alone the living.

Emma moved around the circular table quietly, gathering the used silver and the plates with as little fuss and noise as possible. This was protection in itself, for she believed the less people noticed your existence, the easier it was to get along without trouble.