Quotes About Survival

From the age of 11, I was cleaning floors, washing dishes, making sandwiches and being a cashier. Survival was the name of the game. Life was so hard that I had to struggle to keep up my standards. Under these conditions, I didn't think about science too much.

Many of the master chefs in the South, both the upper South as well as the deep South, were blacks and many of those people came here to Washington, D.C., and opened up establishments. Very, very few of them have survived. But they certainly were very prominent.

I'm not a big fan of the post-Armageddon stories, where Denzel Washington is walking around in a torn coat.

I—I value your continued existence.

That was basic hound logic, learned from Faffy: if you ran, you were prey.

Where's the logic in dying?

Beth: YOU NEED BLOOD! Mick: NOT YOURS!

It's hard to live on the streets. In prison, you can be someone. Life has order if you know how to do time, and I know. I'm an expert. Living in a tent is a temporary thing. You do it until you go back to prison. That's just how it works.

If you stayed there, sooner or later you were going to be visited at night by Russ, who was old, and muscular, and mean. The girls complained about being raped by him as if it were a form of strictness, or rent. They were willing to endure it because they didn't have other options. The rest of us did nothing about it because Russ bought us liquor and what were we to do, call the police? One of them was known for taking girls out to Point Lobos instead of to the police station.

When the police came to San Lorenzo they were fired upon by children and grandmothers with rocks, buckets of water, rotten eggs. There was more of the proletarian shopping, as it was called, that I'd seen on the Via del Corso. Jeans for the people. Cheese and bread and wine for the people. Umbrellas for the people, because rain fell and fell that week.

Charles Bukowski's Factotum

before she was lost to the Tenderloin, north of Fascination, up in the boisterous and dirty hotels that formed the pearls on the chain of her bare life, barer even than mine.

I was the one who was fighting for survival and I was also the murderer within.

If my mind began to wander again, I found a way to distract it. Stay busy. Get drunk. Get laid. Anything to escape the chamber of torture that was my mind.

It was like being in a struggle for survival against a murderous foe, except I was the one who was fighting for survival and I was also the murderer within.

How easy to be a bird or an animal, living from day to day, unaware you're alive, unaware that one day you will die.

Sometimes, when things are confusing, we try and make sense of it our own way; we find ways of coping up.

Never turn your back until you're sure your enemy is dead. Dimitri Belikov

Life had already taught Stephen one thing, and that was that never must human beings be allowed to suspect that a creature fears them. The fear of the one is a spur to the many, for the primitive hunting instinct dies hard -- it is better to face a hostile world than to turn one's back for a moment.

Have you ever thought about the enormous courage of trees? I have, and it seems to me amazing, The Lord dumps them down and they just gotta stick it, no matter what happens.

Oh, Stephen, Stephen, get used to the world -- it's a horrible place full of horrible people, but it's all there is, and we live in it, don't we? So we've just got to do as the world does, my Stephen.

There seldom seemed to be a house left with a roof, or with anything much beyond its four walls, and quite often they must lie staring up at the stars, which would stare back again, aloof and untroubled.

The grey of a bitter, starved-looking morning. The town like a mortally wounded creature, torn by shells, gashed open by bombs. Dead streets - streets of death - death in streets and their houses; yet people still able to sleep and still sleeping.

If you'd been a dog, They would have drowned you at birth.