Quotes About Survival

Many children with cancer in the developing world can be cured. But without appropriate treatment, few survive.

In Sept of 2013 I was diagnosed as having an aggressive form of stage 2 endometrial cancer. I underwent a rigorous treatment program that included a radical hysterectomy followed with chemo and radiation therapy.

Better treatment and detection methods have also improved the survival rate for people with cancer, and for the first time in history, this year the absolute number of cancer deaths in the U.S. has decreased.

When I was 41, I found a lump the size of a grape in my right breast. I ended up bald, sick and exhausted from surgeries, chemo and radiation treatments. Ah, but I got to live.

I had throat cancer, and I had to have radiation treatments, and I couldn't sing for a long time; and this was in '97. I had 28 radiation treatments. I didn't die, thank God.

I never hate my bullies from high school. I actually kind of appreciate them. If it wasn't for that boot camp training of how the world treats gay people and especially drag queens, I don't know if I would have survived as well as I have.

The latest revelation - from no Mount Sinai, Sermon on the Mount or Bo tree - is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what that creation once was.

My best friend was Aboriginal. She taught me about 'bush tucker' - the food of the land, the different things you could eat if you got lost in the bush, like grasses and berries. There's this tree called the billygoat plum - the fruit is quite nice.

When I'm cutting a tree, if I'm thinking about anything other than that 40-foot oak tree... I'm a dead man. It's a therapy thing for me.

I loved 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.' I read it later as an adult, but I loved 'We Have Always Lived in a Castle.' And that brings you around to 'The Lottery.' You can't pretend - it's a lottery in which you draw a name and people die. That's a short story, but it's such an incredible short story.

A huge famine hit North Korea in the mid-1990s. Ultimately, more than a million North Koreans died during the famine, and many only survived by eating grass, bugs, and tree bark.

Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it's really not a very good defense - rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.

For a tree, to endure four months of daylight is like you or I going without sleep for four months.

You can only fall so far through a tree before the limbs become abrasive to your body.

I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life - this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can't be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don't have what we call intelligence, and they're surviving just fine.

A person should not be too honest. Straight trees are cut first and honest people are screwed first.

Trees, though they are cut and loped, grow up again quickly, but if men are destroyed, it is not easy to get them again.

Trees face many difficulties, what with deforestation and pollution, but that didn't stop me from wanting to be one - to just stop feeling and live.

My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain.

So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us. Because the planet doesn't need to be saved. It doesn't care if all the squirrels, elephants, and trees die and there's just a couple of amoebas floating around at the poles.

Every time I found an egg to eat, or when I survived a storm in which trees were collapsing all around me, I felt that it was Providence. I don't need to believe - I know.

In Tanzania, the chimps are isolated in a very tiny patch of forest. I flew over it 13 years ago and realized that, basically, all the trees had gone, that people all around the park are struggling to survive. It became very clear that there was no way to protect the chimps while the people were in this dire circumstance.

When I was six, the Korean War broke out, and all the classrooms were destroyed by war. We studied under the trees or in whatever buildings were left.

I grew up in the Northeast; I've seen hurricanes before and trees down and cars destroyed.