Quotes About Survival

To survive painful beliefs and feelings, we often mask them with anger. That way, we don't have to feel the shame behind it.

Childhood trauma may sneak up from behind and fuck you in the ass when you grow up, but at least it leaves a tip on the nightstand.

Whenever people idealize their caretakers, chances are pretty good that the opposite is true. Sometimes illusion is created by the parents, who insists in godlike fashion that they're perfect and that the child owes them obedience because they're responsible for his or her existence. Other times the illusion is created by the child as a survival strategy, disconnecting from reality in order to avoid the pain of growing up in a toxic enviroment.

I couldn't buy the lice off a sick cat, the cabbie answered from the very depths of self-deprecation.

And they looked like poor fishermen. But this was Cuba, where everyone had a second job.

Also, after the Crash of '29, this building chalked up six jumpers

this was the Middle East. The land of the mirage, the shimmering pond in the sand that drew you farther into the deadly desert, and when you arrived at the lifesaving water, it disappeared, and you discovered the bones of those who'd been there before you. You discovered death.

The short-timers, who'd gone through hell without even a small pee in their pants, were all jittery that something was going to happen before they boarded the freedom bird home. I mean, after you've cheated death for so long, you become paranoid, sure that death had just remembered you were leaving.

of themselves. At least until the next glacier came through. Sloan looked up from his newspaper, apparently

Most accidents, I'm convinced, are God's way of getting rid of stupid people. Or if you believe in Darwinism, you wonder why there are any stupid people left in the world. Well, I guess they can reproduce before they remove themselves from the gene pool.

Survival is a strong instinct, surrender is not an option, and all combat is justifiable homicide. But you pay a price.

survived one trip into

Here they go cruising for a fortnight up in parts where everyone is dead of radiation, and all that they can catch is measles!

John Osborne laughed. "It's not the end of the world at all," he said. "It's only the end of us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan't be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.

People who spent the war in prison camps have written a lot of books about what a bad time they had, she said quietly, staring into the embers. They don't know what it was like, not being in a camp.

So let them pass, small people of no great significance, caught up and swept together like dead leaves in the great whirlwind of the war.

You did not die when you were drawing public assistance money, but you certainly did not remain alive.

Even into this quiet place the war had reached like the tentacle of an octopus and had touched this girl and brought about her death. Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after it's all over.

It was her dog getting killed that put the lid on it," said Viola, seven years later. "Funny, that, wasn't it? She stood up quite well when your brother got killed and when her father got killed, but when the dog got killed it finished her. I suppose she felt responsible or something." "I suppose she did," I said. "What happened after

Let every nation know," declared Kennedy in his inaugural address, "that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

To date, around 99.9 percent of all species ever to have inhabited Earth have become extinct.

All these people want is a chance for the future, a chance they will follow with a strict consequentness [sic]. They will resent pity, they will be suspicious of oversolicitousness. They have seen man from his most evil side, who can blame them for being suspicious? They will resent having somebody plan every little detail for them. And in all fairness, who can blame them for that? Have they not lived in the land of the dead and so what can be so terrifying about the land of the living?

T]o divine the direction on a calm sea may prove more difficult than to chart a course through tempestuous waters, where the violence of the elements imparts inspiration through the need for survival."25

Can it really be that England became the first industrial nation mainly because bad sanitation and disease kept life exceptionally short for the majority of people, giving the rich and enterprising minority a better chance to pass on their genes?