Quotes About Survival

My feeling is, we ran from animals for three million years. It's our time now. If a cow could eat you, it would. And it wouldn't care how comfortable your truck ride over was, either.

Knife fights are something that happen between the Sharks and the Jets, that's it. Everywhere else, it's not a fight, it's just someone trying to goddam kill you.

You get them to the main gate, don't stop until you're outside," Bell tells her, then turns, directing his words at the others. "You understand? All of you, follow Lilac. Follow Lilac. Don't stop. Run." "Lily runs," the girl says softly. "Lilac dances." "Not today," Lilac says. "Today, we run so fast that Lily won't believe it when we tell her. Right?" The girl nods, wide-eyed.

Blood in, blood out. You kill to get in. They kill you before they will ever let you leave.

It has nothing to do with rough or gentle. Privileged or broke, everyone has their own path to the light. Sometimes those of us who came up hard are forced to see what actually matters. If we survive, that is. The world doesn't allow us not to see. We are forced into understanding, into grace. It's either that or prison, or drugs, or the cold, hard earth.

The great challenges of life appear to us when, and only when, we have everything we need to survive and heal from the experience.

He had not been right, had not been normal. And then his natural predisposition had been encouraged and further corrupted by "environmental factors." That was what his first psychologist had called it. "Environmental factors." Like being raped by a thirty-three-year-old man at the age of seven, Doctor? she'd wanted to yell. Is that an "environmental factor?

The things you learn growing up in and out of prison, Allander thought. A practical education.

He has spent a lifetime in the vicinity of trauma, usually inflicting it. He is known by some as Evan Smoak. To a few, he is known as Orphan X.

The last ounce of what he had to give was the ounce that had saved his life.

It cost me my identity. Being molested created such sexual and emotional confusion that I was an old man before I was fifteen and still a boy at thirty. I felt numb and removed, like I was not there, just a piece of property for others to use and discard.

Flattery isn't the highest compliment – parasitism is.

Social laws acted and people were maimed, damaged, robbed, and strangled by forces they could not even glimpse. People were driven to sickness, to desperation, to loneliness and fear and remorse. Shaken by tears and longing, in a world they fundamentally failed to fathom, they nonetheless carried on. There was

The argument is instead that it rewarded with economic and hence reproductive success a certain repertoire of skills and dispositions that were very different from those of the pre-agrarian world, such as the ability to perform simple repetitive tasks hour after hour, day after day. There is nothing natural or harmonic, for example, in having a disposition to work even when all the basic needs of survival have been achieved.

Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization...

stories are legion about people lying to their spouses for decades. It was a matter of survival; the Soviet regime forced them to deny their thoughts, identities and histories to the extent that they began to doubt themselves, a widespread psychological trauma that has yet to be fully acknowledged, let alone dealt with. No wonder the culture of lying remains deep-seated today, when the daily denial of reality provides fertile ground for Russia's staggering corruption.

To me, poetry is about survival first of all. Survival of the individual self, survival of the emotional life.

I was born with a knife in one hand and a wound in the other.

So much has broken away already, there is nothing to drink but air, nothing left to walk on but water, yet the fasting heart grows full.

plenty of decent people whose lives had been shattered by random events.

it can be hard when you're pedalling furiously below water to stay afloat.

The conflict of theories, leading, as it eventually must, to the survival of the fittest, is advantageous.

The ship of Democracy, which has weathered all storms, may sink through the mutiny of those aboard.

Wer nochmal davongekommen ist, mag sich nicht dauernd dran erinnern lassen, dass andere weniger Glück hatten. Dass sie auf Hilfe angewiesen sind. Und ein Recht auf Hilfe haben!