Quotes About Survival

pugnacity, greed, brutality, and sexual readiness were advantages in the struggle for existence. Probably every vice was once a virtue

That is the way a white man remembers a battle. So many soldiers here, so many there. Such a captain here. Such a lieutenant there. This colonel in one place. That major in another. The horses precisely here, the cannon exactly there. But not an Indian. An Indian remembers where his mother fell bayoneted, or his little brother had his skull smashed, or his big sister cried for mercy and was shot in the mouth.

The cut worm forgives the plow.

When wolves and tigers howl for prey, They pitying stand and weep; Seeking to drive their thirst away, And keep them from the sheep.

Life might be cheap on Terra ... but living wasn't.

Mr William, he said, in my life six times have I crashed, and on not one occasion have I ever been killed.( Bevinda Singh taxi driver from City of Djinns

The Tughluks have gone; Tughlukabad is a ruin; only Nizamuddin remains.

In Chicago [during the Great Depression], a crowd of some fifty hungry men fought over barrel of garbage set outside the back door of restaurant

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.

You know that if I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.

probably by that time he had learned that there were three things and no more: breathing, pleasure, darkness; and without money there could be no pleasure, and without pleasure it would not even be breathing but mere protoplasmic inhale and collapse of blind unorganism in a darkness where light never began.

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

Be scared.You can't help that. But don't be afraid, Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you if you don't corner it or it don't smell that you are afraid. A bear or a deer has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

not even as three women, but merely as three creatures who still possessed the need to eat but took no pleasure in it, the need to sleep but from no joy in weariness or regeneration

The lowly and invincible of the earth—to endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

He was known through all that country. He had no kin, no ties, and he antedated everyone; nobody knew how old he was—a tall thin man in a filthy frock coat and no shirt beneath it and a long, perfectly white beard reaching below his waist, who lived in a mud-daubed hut in the river bottom five or six miles from any road. He made and sold nostrums and charms, and it was said of him that ate not only frogs and snakes but bugs as well—anything that he could catch.

hating is like drink or drugs and she had used it so long that she did not dare risk cutting off the supply, destroying the source, the very poppy's root and seed?

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy. His wife and children may be shoeless; someone will always buy him drink or weapons.

You were required — this was essential, a matter of survival — to know your limits, both physical and emotional. But how could you know your limits unless you tested them? And if you failed the test? You were also required to stay calm if things went wrong. Panic was the first step, everybody said, to drowning.

She and I had survived long separations, and we had never been especially monogamous—she liked to quote Janis Joplin: Honey, get it while you can.

The most difficult challenge to the ideal is its transformation into reality, and few ideals survive.

Two, it seemed, could not live nearly as cheaply as one, especially if that one had been accustomed to subsisting on whatever fell to hand, spending what little money he did have in secondhand bookstores.

you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.