Quotes About Survival

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.

Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess I'm afraid for myself... the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain... remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.

I am I am I am.

They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. --From the poem Lady Lazarus, written 23-29 October 1962

I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.

If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, for as long as I possibly could.

As I paddled on, mt heartbeat boomed like a motor in my ears. I am I am I am.

Well, I tried drowning, but that didn't work; somehow the urge to life, mere physical life, is damn strong, and I felt that I could swim forever straight out into the sea and sun and never be able to swallow more than a gulp or two of water and swim on. The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.

If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, as long as I possibly could.

It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars ...

Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen — physical or psychological — wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.

After all, I am alive only by accident.

Winter is for women — The woman, still at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think. Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas Succeed in banking their fires To enter another year? What will they taste of, the Christmas roses? The bees are flying. They taste the spring. — Sylvia Plath, from "Wintering," Ariel . (Harper & Row 1966)

It was as if we had been forced together by some overwhelming circumstances, like war or plague, and shared a world of our own.

the razor slitting the stomach, and the life throbbing away, red flood by red flood - I lay crouched, kneeling on the khaki quilt on the living room floor where there was air

feel like some eon-old matriarch who has been through ice age and 40-day flood;

Hardship can humble you, but it cannot break you unless you let it. Your instinct for survival will see you through if you're attuned to its frequency. Instinct will find a temporary stopgap without ever taking its sights off your larger goals. There's no greater way to hone your instincts than to overcome adversity.

It's a chore for a fellow to fear for his life more than once in an evening.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

There is no water, so things are bad. If there were water, it would be better. But there is no water.

Survival is your strength not your shame.

These are the ones that suffer least: The aconite under the snow And the snowdrop crying for a moment in the wood.

That is the reason. I keep Wishwood alive To keep the family alive, to keep them together, To keep me alive, and I live to keep them.