Quotes About Survival

In March 1943, my parents, four-year-old sister and I were interned with other foreign civilians at Lunghua camp, a former teacher training college outside Shanghai, where we remained until the end of August 1945.

My - both my sisters died with pancreatic cancer. My brother died with pancreatic cancer. My daddy died of pancreatic cancer. My mother died with breast cancer.

Egypt was tough without our parents. My brothers and sisters had to work day by day, and every time they collected a pay cheque, they brought it into the house and put it on the table. That's how we lived.

During Partition, my parents, my brother and sisters were killed before my eyes.

I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.

Anything I have blown a lot of money on? Well, I have three daughters and a wife - that's four women, and I'm working on a sitcom, so you could say that I am just trying to stay alive!

I was still conscious when I was being transported from the blast site to the hospital.

But if we begin thinking about the world being over 100 million years old, then it's absolutely by chance that you and I are sitting here alive today, while all the others are dead or have never been born.

In this situation I was constantly exposed to danger and death.

A healthy plant is one that adapts best to the situation in which it finds itself. There is no objective measure of this.

Chaos is my natural habitat. I write about chaotic situations and about people finding their way through the chaos, the hope that you can find your way.

On the roads, it is one of those 'might is right' situations. If I see cars coming, I duck out of the way.

Living on the Gulf Coast, we often have to go through dangerous situations, whether you're a child, an adult or a senior citizen.

People are capable of incredible gallantry and terrible cruelty in situations of extreme duress. I tried to showcase that range in 'Enclave.'

My books are about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations.

They continued but six days under this course, having consumed the quantities that could be spared.

We are killing life on Earth, we're in the sixth mass extinction event and it's possible that human beings will go extinct. We're in a culture that doesn't want you to think about that.

I know how to read people. When you grow up in a rough environment, you have to have a sixth sense.

One thing that I always loved about, say, 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', is that Indiana Jones gets the Ark of the Covenant about sixty percent of the way through the movie. And then the rest of it is get-out-alive. To me, that's really cool. Because he's the one you care about at the end of the day.

Like funny men, skilled diners are apparently perceived to have an evolutionary advantage.

I often think I am a better person because I lived for many years of my life with a flashlight. I have developed skills I did not think were possible - bathing with a cup of water by candlelight, for instance, and writing a story with a headlamp on.

Art and love survive war, revolution and death. Things continue. What we put into the earth while we are alive continues beyond us.

Some people think it's naive to think we can make love our new bottom line. What I believe is naive is thinking human civilization as we know it will survive another two hundred years if we do not.

I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.