Quotes About Survival

Aboard the Willful Child 'Well done, everyone,' said Hadrian as he stepped down from the displacement pad, 'you all survived a harrowing voyage down to Ancient Earth in the time period known to historians as the Age of Frothing Hate, where almost everyone acted like stupid little children having temper tantrums because reality refused to conform to their deluded beliefs.

KierowaÅ'a siÄ™ wówczas instynktem, a jej instynkt nie miaÅ' nic wspólnego z altruizmem. Na wojnie altruiÅ›ci nie ?yli dÅ'ugo.

Opposite the Half-Axe was the narrow-fronted entrance to a shop devoted to short lengths of rope and wooden poles a man and a half high. Tehol had no idea how such a specialized enterprise could survive, especially in this unravelled, truncated market, yet its door had remained open for almost six centuries, locked up each night by a short length of rope and a wooden pole.

I see now that the unnamed soldier is a gift. The named soldier—dead, melted wax—demands a response among the living…a response no one can make. Names are no comfort, they're a call to answer the unanswerable. Why did she die, not him? Why do the survivors remain anonymous—as if cursed—while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold?

She was glad she'd missed the river of corpses that must have filled the city streets during the initial phase of clean-up - wagon after wagon groaning beneath the weight of crushed bodies, white flesh seared by fire and slashed by sword, rat-gnawed and raven-pecked - men, women, and children.

Hard lives begat hard laws, not just in the necessities of living, but also in those of believing.

Bloodflies rode her drawn gasps into her mouth, biting as she gagged and spat.

Cultures can die, Hull, but the people live on, and what they carry within them are the seeds of rebirth—

People suffered, many died, but they struggled through and they survived.

I wonder,' Trull said as he watched the momentary stand-off, 'if this is how domestication first began. Not banding together in a hunt for prey, but in an elimination of rival predators.

For himself, Rallick, such gifts had long since been lost, and he was not the kind of man to stir the ashes. No embers survived, no flame could be born anew. Life belonged to other people, and his only claim to it was his power to take it from them. Nor would he recognise hope if it came to him. Too much a stranger, too long a ghost.

Ain't nothing so tensifying as running for your life at a snail's pace

Ain't nothing so tensifying as running for your life at a snail's pace, let me tell you

Life fears chaos. It was ever thus. We fear it more than anything else, because it is anathema. Order battles against dissolution. Order negotiates cooperation as a mechanism of survival, on every scale, from a patch of skin to an entire menagerie of interdependent creatures. That cooperation, of course, may not of essence be necessarily peaceful - a minute exchange of failures to ensure greater successes.

Along the track, no more than fifty long paces from Duiker's position, a hapless squad of Malazan soldiers writhed on what were locally called Sliding Beds—four tall spears each set upright, the victim set atop the jagged points, at the shoulders and upper thighs. Depending on their weight and their strength of will in staying motionless, the impaling and the slow slide down to the ground could take hours.

The voracious insects waited for storms like this one, then rode the winds in search of prey.

Grief rapes the mind, and I know all about rape.

What are gods, after all, if not the perfect victims?" He smiled, raising his hands and fluttering his fingers. "For Kruppe, whose sleight of hand is matched only by his sleight of mind? Perfect victims of confidence, claims Kruppe, ever blinded by arrogance, ever convinced of infallibility. Is it not a wonder that they have survived this long?

his life had been rather headlong. He felt as if he was plunging down a steep hill, for ever but one step from bone-snapping, blood-spraying disaster. Used to be he thrived on such feelings. Proof that he was alive. Yet…too many friends had fallen to the wayside on the journey. Far too many, and he was reluctant to let others take their places

Midnight comes often in the dusk of my life, when I look back upon all that I have survived. The deaths of so many for whom I cared and loved in my heart, have expunged all sense of glory from my thoughts. To have escaped those random fates has lost all triumph. I know you have seen me, friend, my lined face and silent regard, the cold calcretions that slow my embittered pace, as I walk down the last years, clothed in darkness as are all old men, haunted by memories …

Do you find the need to answer all this, Historian?" he asked. "All those tomes you've read, those other thoughts from other men, other women. Other times. How does a mortal make answer to what his or her kind are capable of? Does each of us, soldier or no, reach a point when all that we've seen, survived, changes us inside? Irrevocably changes us. What do we become, then? Less human, or more human? Human enough, or too human?

A Hood-damned Seguleh. High ranked, too. We'd never have got our shots off – no way. Our heads would have rolled like a pair of oversized snowballs. 'I looked away, Fid. I looked right down at the ground when she turned my way.' 'Me too.' 'And that's why we're still alive.' 'Aye.

Not all instincts guide one to behaviours of survival. Life is mired in stupidity, after all, and the smarter the life, the stupider it can be.

That is one curse we all share -- the will to live.