Quotes About Survival

I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell's notion that a culture or society without mythology would die, and we're close to that.

Once I was chased by the king of all scorpions. I have the most notorious animal stories.

For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty-megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.

My mother had a horrific life. At fourteen, she was in the Nazi concentration camps. Her sense about life now is, every day above ground is a good day.

Everybody's darkness is different. My darkness came from my mom having pancreatitis and almost dyin'. And what I noticed was that the darkness ain't goin' nowhere.

The great thing about Glasgow is that if there's a nuclear attack it'll look exactly the same afterwards.

I have a little hope that the nuclear holocaust doesn't happen.

Nuclear holocaust might eliminate the Internet.

I would eat fruitcake if there'd been a nuclear war and I'd run out of canned goods.

Look out for Number One. If you don't, no one else will.

The object is to hit the other guy and not get hit. I think the least amount of damage you can take is the best route.

I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.

In the city, you're always looking around, observing everything. In some neighborhoods, your life can depend on it. The details change constantly.

If you've worked in a factory, and you haven't learned how to do something else, you're obsolete. That's just nature.

I had asthma when I was a kid, asthma so bad that it would turn into pneumonia and I almost died several times. Nobody knew why back then, but now it's obvious.

My mom obviously had a problem.

On one occasion I had to sleep on a stretcher balanced on two kitchen chairs. It wasn't glamorous.

Except for the occasional heart attack, I never felt better.

Occasionally, human beings are briefly de-animated, and the stories of people who are briefly de-animated that interest me the most are those having to do with the cold.

I've been shot at on numerous occasions.

I've been homeless on a few occasions.

Red had a deep loathing of the night before them. He had been through so much combat, had felt so many kinds of terror, and had seen so many men killed that he no longer had any illusions about the inviolability of his own flesh. He knew he could be killed; it was something he had accepted long ago, and he had grown a shell about that knowledge so that he rarely thought of anything further ahead than the next few minutes…

What enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.

Boredom slays more of existence than war.