Quotes About Survival

...the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive -- a peculiar form of denial of our mortality?

I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn't know.

Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone's life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble.

Slum kids die slowly, their lives eroded at so languid a pace that even they would have trouble tracing the disintegration. To the children of war death explodes like a car bomb.

Hence it happened that all the armed prophets conquered, all the unarmed perished. [It., Di qui nacque che tutti li profeti armati vincero, e li disarmati rovinarono.]

War is behavior with roots in the single cell of the primeval seas. Eat whatever you touch or it will eat you.

Thus violent deeds live after men upon the earth, and traces of war and bloodshed will survive in mournful shapes long after those who worked the desolation are but atoms of earth themselves.

Some of you young men think that war is all glamour and glory, but let me tell you, boys, it is all hell!

Mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace.

When I was in the war, I was lucky that I was in a plane and never saw the carnage close-up.

Sometimes laughin' is all a body can do, child. It's laugh or lose your mind.

Sometimes I think bimbo is just another word men made up so they could feel superior to women who are better at survival than they are.

When you've been around a snake long enough, you learn how to crawl in the dirt.

Creciste protegida, Daisy, pero yo lo hice de la manera más cruda. Mucho más cruda de lo que puedas imaginar. Cuando creces así, tienes que aprender a protegerte de alguna manera, tienes que aferrarte a algo que impida que te conviertas en una bestia. En mi caso fue el orgullo. Nunca me doblego . Jamás

As she reached for the plates, she wondered if her life could get any weirder. Her life savings had been handed over to a band of South American guerrillas, she had a phony engagement to a famous football player, she was homeless and jobless, and she was making breakfast for Mad Jack Patriot.

These men had good cause to pursue nuptials; if there's one pattern that psychological studies have established, it's that the institution of marriage has an overwhelmingly salutary effect on men's mental health. "Being married," the prominent government demographer Paul Glick once estimated, "is about twice as advantageous to men as to women in terms of continued survival.

I was wondering if the scene in the drawing-room had been a triumph or a disaster or merely a chaotic piece of bad taste verging on bathos, but I reflected that the only important question was whether I had communicated my message to my parents. I continued to smoke my cigarette and occasionally I shuddered. I wondered dimly how anyone ever survived their families.

When I write my book I'm going to tell people that if they happen to forget their wide-mouth jar, they should pee far enough away from their position so it doesn't ruin their hiding spot.

When death visits, it's every man for himself.

Most of us don't have nightmares that come to life and try to kill us.

She's a smokejumper who's afraid of fire. He's the partner who can't forgive himself for loving her. Now they must face the flames together if they hope to survive the Summer of Fire.

He'd faced dangerous criminals. He could eat vegetables. Vegetables didn't kill. Pobably.

I think this is the danger we face whenever time passes and those who have suffered recover from what flattened them. The generation coming up behind might underestimate or miss completely all that the older generation survived. Q.