Quotes About Survival

For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.

Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on.

Beloved wasn't interested. She said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stick their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light.

Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up.

A shudder ran through Paul D. A bone-cold spasm that made him clutch his knees. He didn't know if it was bad whiskey, nights in the cellar, pig fever, iron bits, smiling roosters, fired feet, laughing dead men, hissing grass, rain, apple blossoms, neck jewelry, Judy in the slaughterhouse, Halle in the butter, ghost-white stairs, chokecherry trees, cameo pins, aspens, Paul A's face, sausage or the loss of a red, red heart

They had become an occasional mutter, like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a sth when she misses the needle's eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low friendly argument with which she greets the hens.

How'd you get rid of her?' 'Killed her. Then I killed the me that killed her.' 'Who's left?' 'Me.

Era peligroso que una mujer que había sido esclava amara tanto algo, especialmente si ese algo eran sus propios hijos. Él sabía que lo mejor era querer un poquito, quererlo todo pero solo un poquito, de modo que cuando les rompieran la espalda o los arrojaran en un saco de desperdicios, te quedara un poco de amor para el siguiente

Listen. baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why. But look here, don't carry it inside and don't give it to nobody else. Try to understand it, but if you can't just forget it and keep yourself strong, man.

Poison is like the drowned; it always floats.

Each story has a monster in it who made them tough instead of brave, so they open their legs rather than their hearts where that folded child is tucked.

One by fire, one by water, two of what he had so intensely loved gone, he thought. He couldn't lose a third.

If you do not feed the hungry, they will eat you, and the manner of their eating is as varied as it is FIERCE.

It took some time to figure out the motives for faking love—hers and theirs. Survival, she supposed, literal and emotional.

They did not believe death was accidental-life might be, but death was deliberate. They did not believe Nature was ever askew-only inconvenient...The purpose of evil was to survive it...

After five years of a sad and disgruntled marriage BoyBoy took off. During the time they were together he was very much preoccupied with other women and not home much. He did whatever he could that he liked, and he liked womanizing best, drinking second, and abusing Eva third. When he left in November, Eva had $1.65, five eggs, three beets, and no idea of what or how to feel.

When I get hopeless about human life, which, to be frank, is far too difficult for me, I try to remember that in the desert there is a little butterfly that lives by drinking urine.

Look at these buttons," one soldier said, fingering his gray wool jacket. "I soaked them overnight in a saucer filled with urine." Chemicals in the urine oxidized the brass, giving it the patina of buttons from the 1860s. "My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air and said, 'Tim, you've been peeing on your buttons again.

dialectics, as a veteran communist explained . . . 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet.

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of the interwar years had clearly revealed the inability of capitalists to protect their own best interests, the liberal eral state would have to do it for them whether they liked it or not.

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another.

Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier. It was

Poles died in World War II; proportionately lower than the death rate in parts of Ukraine or among Jews, but a terrible figure notwithstanding. Yet there was a difference. For Poles, it was difficult to survive under German occupation, but in principle you could. For Jews it was possible to survive under German occupation—but in principle you could not.