Quotes About Survival

I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so he sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio.

you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.

At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.

For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die.

Afterward, when the firing ended, they would blink and peek up. They would touch their bodies, feelings shame, then quickly hiding it. They would force themselves to stand. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take on the old logic - absolute silence, then the wind, then sunlight, then voices. It was the burden of being alive.

My whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever wanted to be. I couldn't get my breath; I couldn't stay afloat; I couldn't tell which way to swim.

The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

When the boy hopped away, Azar clucked his tongue and said, 'War's a bitch.' He shook his head sadly. 'One leg, for Crissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo.

Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum's

There's a way out of every disaster except your last one.

C'etait impossible de savoir ci c' etait le froid ou la faim.

Los mares y los climas son lo que son; los navíos solo pueden adaptarse a ellos o hundirse. Jack Shandy

Tim Vicary Historical Novels Nobody's Slave

Is it the war that's done it to you? It's all war, she said. What is? I don't know. Everythin. Raisin a family, keepin yer head above water. Life. War is our natural state.

If we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't."13

Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't."30

only one deaf God, who cannot see, remains—claiming all of creation as His own. If people would invest one hundredth of their devotion to this God in the living brothers and sisters amongst whom they stand, we might have a chance of surviving one another. As it is...

He was the tallest and the strongest of all the children ever born to Doctor and Mrs Noyes and the first of them to survive.

Following a successful exploratory mission to Earth, during which contact was briefly established with Cro-Magnon humans, the expedition returned to their home planet. It was decided to colonize Earth. Tragically, only one of their huge spaceships survived the journey

And in that single crackle of tortured electronics she had lost everything. Her comm, her lights, her limited maneuvering jets, her life support regulator, her emergency beacons. Everything. For a second her thoughts flickered to Skywalker. He'd been lost in deep space, too, awhile back. But she'd had a reason to find him. No one had a similar reason to find her.

You don't leave an enemy at your back...not if you like living. (Mara Jade)

It's the same for those who die and those that survive both are sad as the other

If you love fighting so much…then stop whining for me to kill you. Don't lose and then beg to be killed! Never admit defeat until you're dead! If you lose and you're still alive…then consider it your lucky day. If you had any brains you'd be thinking of ways to stay alive right now! Live…and dedicate yourself to killing the one who left you alive.

The saying "survival of the fittest" is a smoke screen. It's to give the weak the illusion that they too can be predators if they try hard enough. You're not eaten because you're weak. You're eaten because there are fewer of you. Those that become predators are always…numerous…incompetent…and the loudest. You and everybody else realize that, but pretend not to see it.