Quotes About Survival

By August the blitz had begun, and in one month there were suddenly 2,500 unexploded bombs to be dealt with. Roads were closed, factories deserted. By September the number of live bombs had reached 3,700. One hundred new bomb squads were set up, but there was still no understanding of how the bombs worked. Life expectancy in these units was ten weeks.

Girls with poison necklaces to save themselves from torture. Just as women wear amulets which hold their rolled up fortunes transcribed on ola leaf.

The Bedouin were keeping me alive for a reason. I was useful, you see. Someone there had assumed I had a skill when my plane crashed in the desert. I am a man who can recognize an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map. I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone's home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us.

The ships slowly picked their way through, guided from patch to patch of open water by the shouts from the crow's nest. Tern, cape pigeon and white petrel flew around the ship. Seals on the ice were so slow to take fright that they were easily bludgeoned on the head and brought on board for food. In the stomach of one of them they found 9 lb of granite stones, which puzzled Ross, as they were a thousand miles from the nearest land.

Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.

It's brutal out there. A bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. as a rule, animals in the wild don't get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones.

For great many species today, "fitness" means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.

Weeds, as the field guides indicate, are plants particularly well adapted to man-made places. They don't grow in forests or prairies—in "the wild." Weeds thrive in gardens, meadows, lawns, vacant lots, railroad sidings, hard by dumpsters and in the cracks of sidewalks. They grow where we live, in other words, and hardly anywhere else.

why our usual perception of the world is "limited to what is biologically or socially useful"; our brains evolved to admit to our awareness only the "measly trickle" of information required for our survival and no more.

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.

The psychedelic experience of "non-duality" suggests that consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we—and it—like to think.

Whenever history and culture seem stifling, weeds begin to look good.

A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn't do very well.

Each of the tastes has been selected by evolution for its survival value. Either it guides us toward nutrients we need to survive, or it steers us away from ingesting things that might endanger us.

Unlike these other states of consciousness, ordinary waking consciousness has been optimized by natural selection to best facilitate our everyday survival.

I was bullied since primary school, for everything.

Since I had cancer I've realised that every day is a bonus.

It's an incredibly difficult thing to bring a giraffe down. They can kill a lion with a single blow from their feet.

Life is for living and there is only one way to go - unless you are prepared to sink and go down with the ship, which I don't choose to do.

If the ship is sinking, you need help getting off that ship.

Organisms sip energy, because they have to work or barter for every single bit that they get.

I lost my sister Telsche to ovarian cancer in 1997 and my grandparents on my mother's side both had cancer but well into their 70s.

I was 22 when my mother died; my baby sister was 12. We had nothing. We had each other, but we had nothing.

My character's kind of grown up with Katniss. The beginning of the story, they're more or less brother and sister than anything. They're best friends. They've been keeping each other alive. It's a little frustrating, for the character. As the character, not as me.