Quotes About Survival

He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been burned out of him but he was yet walking.

By way of conclusion, Luce said, I lived through it [the rape], so if you can't stand to hear it, you can take me home and go to hell. Men get so damn strange sometimes.

Inman felt like God's most marauded bantling.

but maybe life is like that - you never know when something that's been hidden is going to rise up and bite you, or glow with a golden hue.

Life is difficult. That blunt, three-word statement is an accurate ap praisal of our existence on this planet.

wolf bone was the Stone Age equivalent of a supercomputer.

WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES. In our youth, if we survive them, they're called learning experiences or teachable moments or some-such. And that which does not maim or kill us usually makes us stronger, albeit sometimes also sadder and more cynical.

But, as Andy pointed out, if being a smart-arse was an offence, the Laundry would not exist in the first place.

I've met gibbering horrors from other universes, been psychically entangled with a serial killer fish goddess, stalked by zombies, imprisoned by a megalomaniac billionaire, and I've even survived the attention of the Auditors (when I was young, foolish, and didn't know any better). But I've never lost a classified file before, and I don't ever want there to be a first time. I force myself to sit down

We fight on so that something that remembers being human might survive.

IF ONE WISHES to live to a ripe old age, there are certain activities one should avoid. Chief among these is eating anything larger than one's own head—but not so very far down the list is any activity that involves clambering around the outside of a spaceship.

It was one of ours originally, but no human being can sprint around a building with their helmet off and backpack missing in a fimbulwinter cold enough to freeze liquid oxygen.

We were created for a world where the rule of law did not extend to our kind, and our earliest templates were trained and triaged, so that only the obedient survived. Just imagining the act of disobeying an instruction from one of our Creators can bring about physically disturbing symptoms— Then they all died. And the society we built for ourselves in the twilit afterlife of their world, using the rules they laid out for us, is diseased.

and go looking for a potted plant that appears hardy enough to survive being irrigated with the stuff.

Stuff that really will improve my survival prospects when the tentacles hit the pentacle.

Rule Number One is don't die. Corollary Number One is don't poke things that will certainly kill you, like high-tension cables and hostile level-six Existential Anthropic Threats.

Apocalypses are easier slept through than experienced.

All life is based on the destruction of other life, even on tremendous scales of space and time... Our ancestors understood that right back to the Ice Age, and venerated the animals they had to kill.

Our first priority is the same as it ever was," he said: "survival. Not all of us, or any of us in particular, or forever, but survival is the principal goal. It's the function of all life forms to persist for as long as possible. If nobody and nothing survives, nothing matters. And I don't know about you, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with that.

Guilt was—it was the agony of spirit that made every day bleak. The fear that you might not live up to the cost of your survival—that you might not, somehow, justify the whim of fate that let Death miss you and take so many around you.

John Laroche: You know why I like plants? Susan Orlean: Nuh uh. John Laroche: Because they're so mutable. Adaptation is a profound process. Means you figure out how to thrive in the world. Susan Orlean: [pause] Yeah but it's easier for plants. I mean they have no memory. They just move on to whatever's next. With a person though, adapting almost shameful. It's like running away.

Without the laughter, we'd all be dying too.

She sang. Loudly. Cheerfully. Defiantly. The sun will come up, to-mor-row... If the man battling the elements heard her, he gave no indication. She finished the songs she knew from Annie , then started on Phantom of the Opera. Tally sang to keep the fear tamped down. She sang to defy the storm. She sang to make sure God knew where she was since she couldn't think of an appropriate prayer. And she sincerely hoped He liked show tunes.

Sometimes, we do things that are bad for us in an effort to cope with problems.