Quotes About Survival

Alive enough to have strength to die

The point in Yalbury Wood which abutted on the end of Geoffrey Day's premises was closed with an ancient tree, horizontally of enormous extent ,though having no great pretensions to height. Many hundreds of birds had been born amidst the boughs of this single tree: tribes of rabbits and hares had nibbled at it's bark from year to year; quaint tufts of fungi had sprung from the cavities of it's forks; and countless families of moles and earthworms had crept about its roots.

Intense fear comes in waves; the body can't stand it for long at a time.

I'm going to cut you loose. With all due respect, Doctor, if you fuck with me I'll shoot you dead, here and now. Do you understand that?- Clarice Perfectly.- Hannibal Lecter Do right and you'll live through this. -Clarice

If you spend time in a mental hospital you pick up the drill. You could pass as an orderly, get a job doing it when you got out," Graham said.

No. You know—having to look. It's always bad, but you get so you can function anyway, as long as they're dead. The hospital, interviews, that's worse. You have to shake it off and keep on thinking. I don't believe I could do it now. I could make myself look, but I'd shut down the thinking.

Pity Catherine Martin won't ever see the sun again. The sun's a mattress fire her God died in, Clarice.

There's a moth, more than one in fact, that lives only on tears," he offered. "That's all they eat or drink." "What kind of tears? Whose tears?" "The tears of large land mammals, about our size.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the café curtains cover blank concrete.

Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.

El hombre es un lobo para el hombre

E]very man . . . shuns what is evil, but chiefly the chiefest of natural evils, which is death; and this he doth, by a certain impulsion of nature, no less than that whereby a stone moves downward.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

Brute animals are the most healthy, and they are exposed to all weather, and of men, those are healthiest who are the most exposed.

Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.

There were many indications from history, Frank proposed, that threatened races generally outbred the genocides. The phallus was faster than the gun.

They permitted witnesses, such witnesses as the red toddler, because they believed the witnesses all would perish too.

The more orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan - An hour of life is still life.

Te vendrá muy bien si algún día hay guerra, ¡de la cual Dios nos libre! –¿Dios nos libre? Hablas como un civil. La guerra es necesaria. Sin guerras, el mundo no tardaría en corromperse

I need criticism the way a man dying of thirst needs water.

Good Demeter mothering keeps a child in the heat and passion of life which immortalize and establish soulfulness. Mothering involves not only physical survival and achievement—Demeter's grain and fruit—it is also concerned with guiding a child to his or her unknown depths and the mystery of fate.

For great and horrible punishments be appointed for thieves, wheras much rather provision should have been made that there were some means they might get their living, so that no man should be driven to this necessity.

For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence.

To those of us who survived [...], it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid.