Quotes About Survival

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. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land.

the skill of staying poised in worrying times. To survive what's headed our way—global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments—and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will need to trust each other, because today, it's as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.

To eliminate diversity would be like eliminating carbon and expecting life to go on.

She talked in flat tones, keeping her mouth half-closed so that the words came out in a mutter without changing the lines of her face. Margaret had suffered much hardship and degradation of body and was unwilling now to offer the world anything superfluous.

Do they still exist?

Whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion

Ah, it's a real pit. Sort of place where they eat what they run over on the road. Gorillaville. You eat the beer, then you drink

Whatever lay ahead, he was glad to be alive.

You could get used to anything if you had to. She knew that now.

For over a long period of time there's little in life so disheartening as constant cold - not deep enough to kill, mayhap, but always there, stealing your energy and your will and your body-fat, an ounce at a time.

Better to be dirty than dead.

Part of her wanted to run. Never mind how flowing water was bound to take her to people eventually, all that was likely just a crock of Little House of the Prairie shit.

She had a bottle of water in her pack—a big one with a squeeze-top—but suddenly all Trisha wanted in the world was to prime the pump in the little hut and get a drink, cold and fresh, from its rusty lip. She would drink and pretend she was Bilbo Baggins, on his way to the Misty Mountains.

The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we're still alive, after all.

Seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by atomic bombs, the world is still here even though many nations have atomic weapons, even though primitive human emotions still hold sway over rational thought and superstition masquerading as religion still guides the course of human politics.

What if death drives us insane? What if we survive, but it drives us insane? What then?

It would occur to him later that the body knows how to fight when it has to. That it's a secret the body keeps, just as it does the secrets of how to run or jump a creek or throw a fuck or—quite likely—die when there's no other choice. That under conditions of extreme stress it simply takes over and does what needs doing while the brain stands off to one side, unable to do anything but whistle and tap its foot

How its heart beats! How it struggles to get away! As we do, Paul. As we do. We think we know so much, but we really don't know any more than a rat in a trap—a rat with a broken back that thinks it still wants to live.

When a spider sucks blood from a fly, he also works hard.

But if he imagined this gift from his enemies had driven a stake through the Testament, he was mistaken. It would never die.

A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to go out and kill something.

A sportsman is a man who, every now and then, simply has to get out and kill something.

In fact, "grow or die" is the moral imperative of all existence.

Satisfied needs do not motivate. It's only the unsatisfied need that motivates. Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival—to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.