Quotes About Survival

Death is the only teacher in evolution

Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance.

Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works

The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out. That's why I'm always hoping society never collapses because the first ones to go will be entertainers.

Everyone wanted her to be happy; that was the lie of their age, that being happy was the goal. Take the pills, be happy, forget that the sky had been torn from the world this summer. But she was a country at war, its territory invaded, citizens slaughtered, fighting for its survival.

How did people protect themselves? How did anyone keep this world from ruining them?

There were no measures that truly protected against disaster; you simply held on to what mattered and hoped that you found your way to the other side.

To lose someone close to you is to enter an experience no amount of forethought or hindsight can free you from. You must live through grief. You cannot outsmart it, nor think through the fact of someone's being gone, and forever. You must survive the sorrow.

Sixth grade you didn't survive just endured.

To lose someone close to you is to enter an experience no amount of forethought or hindsight can free you from. You must live through grief. You cannot outsmart it, nor think through the fact of someone's being gone, and forever. You must survive the sorrow.

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water." —W. C. FIELDS

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

The Tiger in the Tunnel

We must live. Or what have we suffered for? Will these years have been for nothing?

I used to think Ming was her favorite. But she's grown too private, too remote. Rachel is lost. And I am too haolefied, what my mother taught me, so we could survive in that other world, the one that killed her

I've known the taste of fear from birth. It was in my mother's milk.

They had left the mountains and entered the world, and he became a predator. She had survived by playing dead.

The city was like a fish dying on hard pavement, hopelessly gasping for air.

William Strachey and the others who had battled for four days to survive the hurricane threw themselves to the sand above the high-water mark to rest and to dry their sodden clothing.

Ravens and the others were able to find water deep enough to handle the longboat's twenty-inch draft. Before his departure, Ravens promised Gates and Somers and Strachey and the other survivors that if he lived and arrived safe in Virginia, he would return by the time of the next new moon, or by late September. Ravens, in turn, was told that the survivors would light a signal fire to guide him back.

Still, John Smith knew he had to have backing if he was to lead the colony successfully even for a few weeks. He would have deeply felt his responsibility to both the four hundred or so newcomers who had survived the hurricane as well as the approximately two hundred already living in Jamestown when the remnants of the 1609 fleet arrived.

Passengers in need of toilet facilities were forced to use slop buckets that soon spilled over and added to the general miasma below or to climb into the "beak"—all the way forward beneath the bowsprit—where they would perch precariously on a seat to relieve themselves as the vessel rolled with the waves and then clean themselves using a length of rope that hung from the bowsprit so that it trailed in the ocean below.

Even in the best of times, meals were rough affairs. Once their private stores ran out, not long after the voyage began, Gates and Somers and all the other important men and women on the vessel were forced to eat the same bad food as the lowliest of the deckhands: a hard biscuit and perhaps some cold porridge, washed down by sour beer or foul water.

Remarkably, all 150 men, women, and children on the ship were eventually brought safely to shore. Even the ship's dog was saved.