Quotes About Survival

When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again.

Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.

It's just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they're usually alive. Fairy tales are about survival. That's all they're about. The princess lives to get married in the last act. The detective solves the woman; the knight saves her. And really, really , when you put a fairy tale together with grime and despair and industrial angst you get the Gothic, and that's where we live, Percy.

it is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one's stomach than of one's nation

But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you'll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?

Humans are remarkably adaptable, and in some ways we adapt better to the worst-case scenario than to the idea that anything can be better. There is a full cup of fatalism in the recipe for Homo sapiens sapiens , and some of us are very much more comfortable with the world ending than it going on.

Kid, nobody really gets anywhere in this life. Everybody just picks someplace to hunker down and barricade themselves in. Some of us just got better bricks than others.

Everything in the world, it turns out, is escapable except economy.

Magic is just a word for what's left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.

It's Survival of Them Who's Best at Nicking Things, girl!

All hands drowned, except the Red Hound of Mykenos, who bit the sea until it spit him back. Old

Cathy slowly discovers the terrible childhood Dawn has had; rejected by her parents, left to fend for herself, then subjected to violent treatment by her relatives.

Emotional scars often run the deepest.

Women could survive on their own and men needed a woman in their life.

For many immigrants, if you move here with trauma, you're going to do what it takes to get by. You cheat. You beat your wife. You gamble. You're a survivor and, like most survivors, you are a god-awful parent. Watching

Humor was a form of survival, since it created a necessary psychic distinction from slavery.

I don't have to be affected by race; I only choose to think about it. I could live only for myself, for my immediate family, following the expectations of my parents, whose survivor instincts align with this country's neoliberal ethos, which is to get ahead at the expense of anyone else while burying the shame that binds us.

For many immigrants, if you move here with trauma, you're going to do what it takes to get by. You cheat. You beat your wife. You gamble. You're a survivor and, like most survivors, you are a god-awful parent

This is how an owl must look to a mouse in that last second before the talons sink into the flesh.

So, you are happy to be a pigeon?" "Maybe so. But at least a pigeon does no harm. The hawk lives at the expense of the other creatures that dwell in the desert.

Much later, when I could think about it clearly, I consoled myself that there were many worse ways in which I might have been raped.

O let it be enough what thou hast done, When spotted deaths ran arm'd through every street, With poison'd darts, which not the good could shun, The speedy could outfly, or valiant meet. The living few, and frequent funerals then, Proclaim'd thy wrath on this forsaken place: And now those few who are return'd agen Thy searching judgments to their dwellings trace. From Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders, 1666, by John Dryden

Who wouldn't be in a state of denial when your next-door neighbor suddenly starts shooting at you, casually and without remorse, like you're some kind of unwanted introduced species.

Mares had the capability to slow birthing so that the foal would have the dark hours to find its feet and be ready to run from a predator by dawn.