Quotes About Survival

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. All of it, the literal and the fanciful.

Every Negro boy—in my situation during those years, at least—who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a "thing," a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way. And it does not matter what the gimmick is.

Because only an artist can tell and only an artist have told, since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone that gets this planet, to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die, what it is like to fear death, what is it like to fear, what it is like to love, what it is like to be glad.

Why would I want to poison you? Then I have no job and I have only just found out that I want to live.

We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children's children.

Whatever the Europeans may actually think of artists, they have killed enough of them off by now to know that they are as real-and as persistent- as rain, snow, taxes or businessmen.

We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement.

If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne.

The people did not go away, of course; once a people arise, they never go away (a fact which should be included in the Marine handbook).

I have been alone so long—I do not think I would be able to live if I had to be alone again.

On the morning of the evening that we met I had been turned out of my room. I did not owe an awful lot of money, only around six thousand francs, but Parisian hotel-keepers have a way of smelling poverty and then they do what anybody does who is aware of a bad smell; they throw whatever stinks outside.

while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything.

It's funny what you hold on to to get through terror when terror surrounds you.

If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring.

a child's major attention has to be concentrated on how to fit into a world which, with every passing hour, reveals itself as merciless.

That's what the Blues and Spirituals are all about. It is the ability to look on things as they are and survive your losses, or even not survive them—to know that your losses are coming. To know they are coming is the only possible insurance you have, a faint insurance, that you will survive them.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

It's hard to see the difference between greatness and mediocrity in good times, when almost everyone is thriving. But when the turbulent times come, the difference becomes stark; the companies that exercised productive paranoia far in advance will pull ahead of the weak mediocrities. And even if the ill-prepared survive the disruptive shock, they will likely never close the gap. The strong and well prepared before the storm continue to pull ahead, never to look back.

Multiply, vary, let the strongest [experiments] win, and the weakest die.

These studies looked at people who had suffered serious adversity—cancer patients, prisoners of war, accident victims, and so forth—and survived. They found that people fell generally into three categories: those who were permanently dispirited by the event, those who got their life back to normal, and those who used the experience as a defining event that made them stronger.53

There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.

Trupul nu-i decat o biata coliba pierduta in pustie.

did. But he was glad her head was deep in his shoulder greatcoat. Again he craned around and caught sight of it, slightly aft and lying flat in the water, now seeming to

It's amputate or die. Simple. And when it comes down to it, you can't die. Not yet. Once you're born, you are obligated to survive. At all costs.