Quotes About Survival

as isolated and alone as if I'd been abandoned on the Patagonian ice cap and left to fend for myself.

What was that Churchill saying? "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." That's what this felt like.

You see, cancer is simply nature's way of making you want to die.' Tatsu.

There's a saying I like. 'Denial has no survival value.' If you're going to play, you have to at least recognize what the game is.

Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong." "What?" "Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong." "I heard you. Are you serious?" I didn't detect anything in his voice, but it was hard to tell over the phone. And he was smoother now than when I'd first met him. "You think I make this shit up to amuse you?" I said.

In my unpleasant experience, unarmed against a knife, you've basically got four options. Your best bet is to run like hell, if you can. Next best is to do something immediately that prevents the attack from getting started. Third is to create distance so you can deploy a longer-range weapon. Fourth is to go berserk and hope not to get fatally cut going through and over your attacker.

Seriously protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with society, ties that most people need the way they need oxygen. You give up friends, family, romance. You walk through the world like a ghost, detached from the living around you. If you were to die in, say, a bus accident, you'd wind up buried in an obscure municipal graveyard, just another John Doe, no flowers, no mourners, hell, no mourning. It's natural, probably even desirable, to be afraid of all this.

would show that inside twenty-one feet against a knife, trying to get a gun out is typically a losing bet, especially if you're backing straight up rather than getting off the line.

A survivor reassesses odds continually and doesn't disrespect them.

The owner of a coffee shop sat diminished in the back of his deserted establishment, waiting for patronage that had long since vanished.

I looked around as though unsure of myself, but it was really just a routine check of my surroundings. Adrenaline causes tunnel vision. Experience and a desire to survive ameliorate it. The faces around the tatami radiated amusement, not danger.

Some people just need a routine, and refuse to accept the consequences of predictability. In my experience, these people tend to get culled, often sooner, sometimes later. It's a Darwinian world out there.

Gavin de Becker had written a great book on the topic—The Gift of Fear.

But denial . . . well, you know what they say about denial." Ben nodded, seeing where this was going now, not wanting to show what he really thought of it. "It has no survival value.

It's hard for the most primal, powerful regions of the mind to abandon habits that were once crucial to the organism's survival, even when the higher mind recognizes those habits are no longer warranted.

What makes me a hard target is that I have no fixed points in my life—no workplace, no address, no known associates—that someone can hook into and use to get to me. If someone had established a connection from Harry to me, he'd have that fixed point. He could be expected to exploit it.

He moves like a cat, hears like a dog, and hides like a rabbit. And strikes like a damn rattlesnake.

Your personality. You know, most people are like sheep. Nice, harmless creatures who want nothing more than to be left alone so they can graze. But then of course there are wolves. Who want nothing more than to eat the sheep.

most people are like sheep. Nice, harmless creatures who want nothing more than to be left alone so they can graze. But then of course there are wolves. Who want nothing more than to eat the sheep." He looked at his soup, then back to her. "But there's a third kind of person. The sheepdog. Sheepdogs have fangs like wolves. But their instinct isn't predation. It's protection. All they want, what they live for, is to protect the flock.

I was impressed. I had been taking care not to stand out or to otherwise become memorable, and he had spotted me anyway. He was well attuned to his environment, to the patterns that might at some point make the difference between winning and losing. Or living and dying.

If the real human environment in developed countries today is third-growth monocultured "forests," tar-sand petroleum, cow-burnt grasslands, and smog-like clouds of microplastics floating in oceans where fish once thrived, then human cultures need to distinguish between sentimentality about loss and the imperative to survive. They need to establish a more relevant politics than the competitive politics of nation-states. And to found economies built not on profit but on conservation.

The alarming situation here for humanity is that H. sapiens, though it has asserted itself as the dominant species on Earth, is at the same time the potential victim of its domination over virtually all Earth's ecosystems. If H. sapiens were to become extinct, the event would simply be regarded as evolution continuing to unfold, a biological future for life but not one that any longer included humanity.

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive... from Crow and Weasel

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint.