Quotes About Survival

Enid snorted. "I like you, Mr. Greene. And ah, what the hell. I can't see how it will help you and yet…I've seen some strange shit. And bad stays. Bad doesn't go away. You bury bad, it digs itself out. You throw bad in the middle of the ocean, it comes back at you like a tidal wave.

In life, you can forgive yourself for a lot, but for reasons that made very little rational sense, it is very hard to forgive yourself for surviving.

Do you know anything about Darwin?" he asked. I thought the question was rhetorical, but he waited for an answer. I said, "Survival of the strongest, all that." "Not the strongest," he said. "That's the modern interpretation, and it's wrong. The key for Darwin was not that the strongest survive—the most adaptable do. See the difference?" I nodded.

It was a perverse offshoot of the Stockholm syndrome. Survival is the thing. The mind will twist to survive. Anything can become normal.

If prison teaches you one thing, it's how to deaden yourself. You show nothing. Ever. You never allow yourself anything, even an emotion, because it will either be exploited or taken away.

It was while he was lost in that thought that Granite Man punched him deep in the stomach. The fist followed through to the point where it seemed the knuckles must have reached the fabric of the couch. Myron snapped closed at the waist. He dropped to the floor, struggled to regain a breath, suffocating from within. He lowered his head to his knees, consumed with one thought: air. He needed air. Susan

It was the type of bad that made you want to do anything to please— —oh God please— —make it stop. It made you think about picking up a gun and silencing the sounds, if you knew where you were, if you knew that you were so close to your bedside table where you kept a gun in that small safe . . . Maya

A dozen thoughts hit me all at once. The biggest was a one-word command: RUN! I had watched the horror movies, the ones where the mentally malnourished airhead goes into the house alone, sneaking around like, well, like me, and then ends up with an ax between the eyes. From the safety of my seat in the cineplex, I had scoffed at their idiocy and now, here I was, in Bat Lady's lair, and someone else was here, in the basement. Why

Later, Simon would claim he felt the danger before it all went wrong. There may indeed be something primal in human beings, some survival mechanism from our caveman days of constant danger that lies dormant in modern man, some sixth sense or instinct that almost never needs to surface in our society, but it's still there, still potent yet latent in a deep part of our genetic makeup.

It hurt so damn much that now something primordial wouldn't let it happen again. I

My kick had landed on Bob's skull with force, jerking his head to the side. Bob's hands instinctively leapt off the steering wheel. The car veered sharply, sending Otto and me—and the gun—into a rolling heap. It was on.

Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out.

the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.

I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure.

She thinks we were all killed when they made the Great Sweep, but I escaped in the mud.

Recovery comes slowly. But the writing—which keeps me alive because it's all I've got—goes on.

And John Hersey in The Child Buyer; and Only Lovers Left Alive, flawed as it was;

None of us knew why AM had saved five people, or why our specific five, or why he spent all his time tormenting us, nor even why he had made us virtually immortal …

He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had. But AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped.

could hear AM draw in his breath. His toys had been taken from him. Three of them were dead, could not be revived. He could keep us alive, by his strength and talent, but he was not God. He could not bring them back.

Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don't know. AM has been having fun for some time, accelerating and retarding my time sense. I will say the word now. Now. It took me ten months to say now. I don't know. I think it has been some hundreds of years.

Inwardly: alone. Here. Living. under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last. AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet … AM has won, simply … he has taken his revenge … I have no mouth. And I must scream.

Ich bin ein Jude, und wenn es etwas gibt, was Juden in ein bissel mehr als sechstausend Jahren gelernt haben, dann ist es, dass man Kompromisse eingehen muss, um es bis siebentausend zu schaffen.

José] Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world [..] He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile — he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.