Quotes About Survival

Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who bought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities -- their brute persistence.

one of the main things that school taught, I realized, was how to lie to get by.

JOSEPH STALIN, the leader of Russia, ordered operatives to remove all the stores of food from farming towns in the Ukraine. Millions of people had no bread—they ate field mice, insects, husks, and dead children. It was 1933.

Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.

And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.

I'm not telling you that suicidal people aren't so far away from people who can get by; I'm telling you that people who can get by aren't so far away from being suicidal.

I have no idea what the record for being effectively dead is, but Fabrice Muamba didn't seem to have broken it.

Pada akhirnya, hidup itu seperti udara. Will tak lagi memiliki keraguan akan hal tersebut. Sepertinya tidak ada cara untuk kabur atau pun melihat dari jauh, dan satu hal yang ia bisa lakukan saat itu hanyalah tetap hidup dan bernapas.

You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in, in the hope that you might be lucky, and the knife has actually been staunching the blood. You want to know the conventional medical wisdom? The conventional medical wisdom is that you keep the knife in. Really.

Sex is far more widespread than seems reasonable.

Once the little squirt has found a suitable home, it attaches itself soundly to the spot and then, needing it no longer, reabsorbs its own brain (a feat that arouses much admiration among university professors, Steve Jones quips).

I hope to persuade you that energy is central to evolution, that we can only understand the properties of life if we bring energy into the equation.

multicellular life. All animals, all plants, all of them depend on

One day I'll give birth to a tiny baby girl and when she's born she'll scream and I'll tell her to never stop I will kiss her before I lay her down at night and will tell her a story so she knows how it is and how it must be for her to survive I'll tell her to set things on fire and keep them burning I'll teach her that fire will not consume her that she must use it

When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of shit

I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I-he-none of us-would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she'd built a world out of them she knew how to survive on even if no one else could.

There's a hurried intensity in the strokes--you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It's as if he knew there wasn't much time left. And yet, there's a serenity in his face, a sense of something that's survived its own ruin.

to survive the dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain thing about myself . . . I simply came to believe that one, factual circumstances of my life were almost accidental and didn't grow out of my own sould, and two, I possessed something unique, a special strength and depth of feeling that would allow me to withstand the hurt and injustice without being broken by it.

Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. I lived. It wasn't easy. And yet. I found out how little is unbearable.

to survive the dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain thing about myself . . . I simply came to believe that one, factual circumstances of my life were almost accidental and didn't grow out of my own soul, and two, I possessed something unique, a special strength and depth of feeling that would allow me to withstand the hurt and injustice without being broken by it.

The truth is the thing I invented so that I could survive.

I won't waste your time with the injuries of my childhood, with my loneliness, or the fear and sadness of the years I spent inside the bitter capsule of my parents' marriage, under the reign of my father's rage, after all, who isn't a survivor from the wreck of a childhood? I have no desire to describe mine; I only want to say that in order to survive the dark and often terrifying passage of my life I came to believe certain things about myself.

The absurdity of believing that the decisions about who we love, and who we bind ourselves to, could be arrived at rationally? Or of assuming that we would be afforded a fair or natural death? Or did she mean the absurdity of having once believed in the possibility of dedicating one's life to anything beyond tomorrow, beyond just surviving? Or just the simple, long-standing absurdity of having lived a beginning that bore so little relation to the end?

That was the end of my search to find someone that would make my mother happy again. I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I–he–none of us–would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she'd built a world out of them she knew how to survive in, even if no one else could.