survival Quotes

“Something in me did not want to give up on life, was unwilling to let go, wanted to fight to the very end. Where that part of me got the heart, I don’t know.”

“The display of ferocity, of savage courage, made me realize that I was wrong. All my life I had known only a part of her.”

“Survival had to start with me. In my experience, a castaway’s worst mistake is to hope too much and do too little.”

“I had no idea a living being could sustain so much injury and go on living.”

″[T]o think that I’m a strict vegetarian. To think that when I was a child I always shuddered when I snapped open a banana because it sounded to me like the breaking of an animal’s neck. I descended to a level of savagery I never imagined possible.”

“Now he turned on to the side street . . . resisting the urge to sob or even imagine the safety that might be awaiting him. He reminded himself that this was no time for hope. Certainly he could almost touch it. He could feel it, somewhere just out of reach. Instead of acknowledging it, he went about the business of deciding again what to do if he was caught at the last moment or if by some chance the wrong person awaited him inside.”

“It’s harder to find a Jew in the dark. He sat on his suitcase, waiting. How many days had it been now? He had eaten only the foul taste of his own hungry breath for what felt like weeks, and still, nothing. Occasionally voices wandered past and sometimes he longed for them to knuckle the door, to open it, to drag him out, into the unbearable light.”

“I could not abandon Richard Parker. To leave him would mean to kill him. He would not survive the first night.”

“It came as an unmistakable indication to me of how low I had sunk the day I noticed, with a pinching of the heart, that I ate like an animal, that this noisy, frantic, unchewing wolfing-down of mine was exactly the way Richard Parker ate.”

“When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.”

“Hardships make or break people.”

“It’s amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this book survives, his ideas live.”

“I am always saying ‘Glad to’ve met you’ to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

“Mark Watney’s prolonged mission and fight for survival are giving us more knowledge about Mars then the rest of the Ares program combined.”

“The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.”

“What I’ve started I must finish. I’ve gone too far to turn back. Regardless of what may happen, I have to go forward.”

“How can I not trust another human completely? We’re family—both part of the brotherhood of extinction.”

“This ain’t got nothin’ to do with no hate or like or love or friends or anything. All we care about is surviving. Drop your sissy side and start using that shuck brain if you got one.”

“Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flights–how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.”

“‘I’m sorry,’ Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.”

“Her Grace was not killing. Her Grace was survival.”

Suppose you fell over with this fish. Is there anything you could do? Sure. Pray. It’d be like falling out of an airplane without a parachute and hoping you’ll land in a haystack. The only thing that’d save you would be God, and since He pushed you overboard in the first place, I wouldn’t give a nickel for your chances.

“Through every kind of disaster and setback and catastrophe. We are survivors. And we teach our kids about that.”

“Above the South Col, up in the Death Zone, survival is to no small degree a race against the clock.”

“You are strong and brave and you can get through this.”

“They had worked two and three jobs, put children through high school and college, and become pillars of their community. I admired them, but I knew the whole time that I was merely encountering the survivors...”

“It’s a mean world...there’s nobody to take care of you out there.”

“The death of something living is the price of our survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.”

“These giants of the forest are something to behold. Some have been growing for a thousand years, and each tree contains its own story of the centuries’ long struggle for survival. Looking at the annular rings of the wood, you can tell what seasons they have been through. In some drought years they almost perished, as growth is barely perceptible. In others, the growth was far greater.”

“Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can’t survive without.”

“A month or so ago, her mother had sewn the stars on all her clothes. On all the family’s clothes, except her little brother’s. Before that their identity cards had been stamped with the word “Jew” or “Jewess.”

“If Darwin were alive today the insect world would delight and astound him with its impressive verification of his theories of the survival of the fittest. Under the stress of intensive chemical spraying the weaker members of the insect populations are being weeded out. Only the strong and fit remain to defy our efforts to control them.”

“They control the food, they control us. Some people know how to grow food, some know how to process it, others know how to cook it. But none of us know how to do it all. We could never survive on our own.”

“He became quicker of movement than the other dogs, swifter of foot, craftier, deadlier, more lithe, more lean with ironlike muscle and sinew, more enduring, more cruel more ferocious, and more intelligent. He had to become all these things, else he would not have held his own nor survived the hostile environment in which he found himself.”

“Winn-Dixie started to snore, and I nudged him with my foot to try to make him quit. I wanted to hear the rest of the story. It was important to me to hear how Littmus survived after losing everything he loved.”

“I wondered how many other things were lurking around waiting to take a child’s life when you weren’t paying attention. I was useless. I was crazy to think I was doing this child a favor by whisking her away from the Cherokee Nation.”

“Part of me felt guilty. Was it selfish that I wanted to live, even though my parents were gone?”

“The degree to which a surviving parent copes is the most important indicator of the child’s long-term adaptation. Kids whose surviving parents are unable to function effectively in the parenting role show more anxiety and depression, as well as sleep and health problems, than those whose parents have a strong support network and solid inner resources to rely on.”

“If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”

“You’ve gotta learn to defend yourself. You kids should have been given some training in self-defense . . . It’s never too late. It takes a warrior to fight a battle and survive. This here is a battle if I’ve ever seen one.”

“I knew for certain something would have to change if I were going to stay in that school. Either the students would have to change the way they behaved, or I would have to devise a better plan to protect myself. My body was wearing out real fast.”

“She is dying Sara. She will die, either tonight or tomorrow or maybe a year from now if we’re really lucky. You heard what Dr. Chance said. Arsenic’s not a cure. It just postpones what’s coming.’ My eyes fill with tears. ‘But I love her,’ I say, because that is reason enough.”

“But, Eva, dear, your shoes are carrying your most valuable possession-your life.”

“Now that we had survived a major rebel attack together, it felt like these small bonds had sealed into something unbreakable.”

“The child let out a soft cry and its tiny fists pummeled the air. Its fight for life had begun.”

“Survival had its price: guilt.”

“Raw meat is not a nice thing to fill one’s pockets with, but they folded it up in fresh leaves and made the best of it. They were all experienced enough to know that they would feel quite differently about these squashy and unpleasant parcels when they had walked long enough to be really hungry.”

“The lamp l am writing by is deer fat poured into a turtle shell with a strip of my old city trousers for a wick.”

“I looked through the clear water and saw the tracks of mussels in the mud. I ran along the log back to shore, took off my clothes, and plunged into that icy water. I collected almost a peck of mussels in very little time.”

“Hunger is a funny thing. It has a kind of intelligence of it’s own.”

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

“I left New York in May. I had a penknife, a ball of cord, an ax, and $40… I also had some flint and steel.”

“I am well and healthy. The food is good. Sometimes I eat turtle soup, and I know how to make acorn pancakes. I keep my supplies in the wall of the tree in wooden pockets that I chopped myself.”

“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it.”

“In desperate situations, people could live for three minutes without oxygen, three hours without warmth, three days without water, three weeks without food.”

“I have played the fox, now I must play the cat of the fable.”

“It was ... time to lie snug in a hole ... and wait for a curtain of cloud to be drawn across the face of ... space. ”

“Working carefully from a small beginning, he soon had a roaring fire, over which he thawed the ice from his face and in the protection of which he ate his biscuits. For the moment the cold of space was outwitted.”

“He worked slowly and carefully, keenly aware of his danger. Gradually, as the flame grew stronger, he increased the size of the twigs with which he fed it. He squatted in the snow, pulling the twigs out from their entanglement in the brush and feeding directly to the flame. He knew there must be no failure.”

“The thought of drove him on, but he ran no more than a hundred feet, when he staggered and pitched headlong. It was his last panic. When he had recovered his breath and control, he sat up and entertained in his mind the conception of meeting death with dignity.”

“He was bound for the old claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek, where the boys were already. They had come over across the divide from the Indian Creek Country, while he had come the round-about way to take a look at the possibilities of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon. ”

″[Mama] would quickly subordinate her own desires to those of the family or the community, because she knew cooperation was the only way to survive.”

“The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.”

“Later the dog whined loudly. And still later it crept close to the man and caught the scent of death. This made the animal bristle and back away. A little longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food providers and fire providers. ”

“The fear I felt was no rational fear, but a panic terror not only of the Martians but of the dusk and stillness all about me. Such an extraordinary effect in unmanning me it had that I ran weeping silently as a child might do. Once I had turned, I did not dare look back.”

“It was as if Salva’s family were helping him, even though they were not there.”

“You’re the toughest 15-year-old on the planet.”

“Salva looked at the hollow eyes and the cracked lips of the men . . . and his own mouth felt so dry that he nearly choked when he tried to swallow.”

“Do you see that group of bushes? You need only to walk as far as those bushes.”

“And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

“‘No. I can survive well enough on my own - if given proper reading material.’”

“The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.”

“The drama of love is all about this hunger for safe emotional connection, a survival imperative we experience from the cradle to the grave. Loving connection is the only safety nature ever offers us.”

“Life was designed for you to thrive not survive. Survivors just get by, Thrivers actually live!!!”

“Distressed partners may use different words but they are always asking the same basic questions, ‘Are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Will you come when I need you, when I call?’ Love is the best survival mechanism there is, and to feel suddenly emotionally cut off from a partner, disconnected, is terrifying.”

“The palms, trooping to the edge of the beach, were motionless in the night air. All the world seemed to hold its breath as this boy climbed up out of the sea.”

“Without the assurance of food, clothing and shelter, unless you’re prepared to die, there’s no other way but to work.”

“My remembery called up the feel of being locked in the stocks, of my face being burnt, of him watching me from across the courtyard; him watching out for me. ‘Twas Curzon who made sure I survived. ‘Twas he who had been my steadfast friend since the day they brought me here.”

“Yes, I do; as long as the heart beats, as long as body and soul keep together, I cannot admit that any creature endowed with a will has need to despair of life.”

“I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.”

“I didn’t save you . . . You saved me.”

“Bitterness never staked its claim. Anger never metastasized into hatred. His heart never hardened; his resolve never vanished. He not only survived; he thrived.”

“If he survived, those patterns would become eternal, for his genes would pass them on to future generations.”

“In a way we’re like a revolutionary group-repossessing society by violence. It’s inevitable. Violence is no stranger to you. You’ve killed. Many times.”

“When you’re flat on your face there’s no time to wonder how you got in and when you’ll get out.”

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question ‘How can we eat?’ the second by the question ‘Why do we eat?’ and the third by the question ‘Where shall we have lunch?‘”

″‘In an infinite Universe anything can happen,’ said Ford. ‘Even survival. Strange but true.‘”

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

“Connor looks flustered and cornered for a moment before he comes to his senses and says, ‘Yeah. Yeah, I am.‘”

″‘So… everything that happened back there was all a show?’ Now it’s Connor’s turn to be unsure. ‘I guess. Sort of. Wasn’t it?‘”

“Something else drove (Connor) to run to that porch, but whatever the real reason was, Connor’s keeping it to himself.”

″‘You two can do whatever you like. Risa and I broke up this morning. Should I turn off the light when I leave?‘”

“Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity.”

“Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.”

“The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side; that there was almost a magical protection about them.”

“He could not possibly survive until Discovery II made its rendezvous with Japetus, four or five years hence.”

″ So a decision was made to abandon the town of Chewandswallow. It was a matter of survival.”

“If anybody could survive on the loose, it would be this kid who showed up from Hollidaysburg. Who slept on floors. Who outran dogs.”

“If anybody could survive on the loose, it would be this kid who showed up from Hollidaysburg. Who slept on floors. Who outran dogs.”

“The first lasted only a moment and the other not even that, so I reckoned babies coming shouldn’t cause all that much trouble. They either came and stayed, or came and didn’t.”

“You can’t stop animals from running away! They’re frightened. They don’t want to be killed and eaten!”

“Afterward, there was that long, crowded pause in which everyone decides that although they are very shaken, and possibly upside down, they are, to their surprise, still alive.”

“Somewhere in this cosmos was Miyax; and the very life in her body, its spark and warmth, depended upon these wolves for survival. And she was not so sure they would help.”

“I’m not afraid of anything now. I’m not scared of anyone. I’m not lonely anymore. I finally understand. I’m in love. We’re in love. That means we’ll meet again. I’m sure of it. And so I’ll live. I’ll survive this. No matter what happens, even if the stars fall, I will live.”

“Get down with somebody or get beat down by somebody.”

“He was not the same and would never be again like he had been. That was one of the true things, the new things. And the other one was the he would not die, he would not let death in again.”

“He did not know how long it took, but later he looked back on this time of crying in the corner of the dark cave and thought of it as when he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn’t work.”

“In the place of my pain, I felt the stirring of determination. I would not give up. I would not turn myself in. No matter what the Nazis did to me, no matter what they took from me, I would survive.”

“I was all alone in the world, but I would survive on my own.”

“We were going to survive, the two of us. We were going to survive—the last two men in the Gruener family written on the pages of the world.”

“The Government justifies keeping everyone else in poverty because people seem to work the hardest when they’re right on the edge of survival.”

“Self love is survival. Without that, oxygen won’t do a damn thing.”

“I returned the box to its hiding place. It could be worse, I thought. The house is still standing. We’re alive. Mother and Eliza must be somewhere safe, I had to believe that. The fever would soon be over, and our lives would return to normal. I just had to stay clever and strong and find something to eat. A tear surprised me by rolling down my cheek. ‘None of that, Mattie girl,’ I whispered to myself as I scrubbed the tear away. ‘This is not the time to be childish.‘”

“For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.”

“As I sat alone in the garage, or read to myself in the near darkness of my parents’ bedroom, I came to realize that I would live like this for the remainder of my life. No just God would leave me like this. I believed that I was alone in my struggle and that my battle was one of survival.”

“Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.”

“The stores on the Polish side were hidden by the wall. Sometimes we looked longingly up at the windows above us, because we could have seen so much more from the. There was just no way to reaching them, though.”

“On the most elemental level the organism works actively against its own fragility by seeking to expand and perpetuate itself in living experience; instead of shrinking, it moves toward more life.”

″...when real danger arises, we’ll be the ones who survive—and not just because we own a 357 Magnum, three glock G19’s, and a Mossberg pump-action shotgun, but because we’ve been prepping, in every possible badass way, since as long as I can remember, for the inevitable collapse of society as we know it.”

“there are a million things we survive every day without recognizing we were ever at risk. Then we have a close call, and we become acutely aware of what that fraction of an inch or that split second means.”

“Everyone does what they must to survive. In that way even we are just like humans.”

Two years after the Last Days, Australia has become a dangerous place, and a battle-ground for survival.

Two years after the Last Days, Australia has become a dangerous place, and a battle-ground for survival.

“The strong Terralba constitution had pulled him through. Now he was alive and half a man.”

“Their lives were utterly uncomplicated because they were devoted to one purpose, dedicated in their entirety to the waging of one battle: the battle with death.”

“For him, rules were about politeness and respect and ensuring the survival of a civilized society.”

“I think of her everywhere. She is my everywhere, in every moment, and also she’s in no one moment. She misses every single one of my moments and I’m not sure who that is harder for: me surviving here without her, or her without me, existing wherever she is.”

“Isolated in a valley by a rock slide, two seventeenth-century children discover for themselves the ways of prehistoric man in their efforts to survive.”

“The night Tom’s schoolteacher comes to dinner and asks Tom’s mother to marry him, Tom slips out of the house and escapes down a nearby stream on a floating slab of packing foam.”

‘The lower the caste,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘the shorter the oxygen.’

“Die? oh, no,” he exclaimed—“not die now, after having lived and suffered so long and so much! Die? yes, had I died years ago; but now to die would be, indeed, to give way to the sarcasm of destiny. No, I want to live; I shall struggle to the very last; I will yet win back the happiness of which I have been deprived.”

“Yes,” said Jurgis, “that’s what they all think; and so they crowd into the cities, and when they have to beg or steal to live, then people ask ‘em why they don’t go into the country, where help is scarce.”

“Alas, my dear mother, some have suffered so much, and yet live, and have raised a new fortune on the ruin of all the promises of happiness which heaven had made them—on the fragments of all the hope which God had given them! I have seen that, mother; I know that from the gulf in which their enemies have plunged them they have risen with so much vigor and glory that in their turn they have ruled their former conquerors, and have punished them.”

“We have had a narrow escape.”

“Everything,” he said, “proves me to be under the protection of some powerful person,—this sudden fortune, the facility with which I have overcome all obstacles, an unexpected family and an illustrious name awarded to me, gold showered down upon me, and the most splendid alliances about to be entered into. An unhappy lapse of fortune and the absence of my protector have cast me down, certainly, but not forever. The hand which has retreated for a while will be again stretched forth to save me at the very moment when I shall think myself sinking into the abyss.”

Because of his very great love, he could not steal from this man, but from any other man, in any other camp, he did not hesitate an instant; while the cunning with which he stole enabled him to escape detection.

The snow walls pressed him on every side, and a great surge of fear swept through him—the fear of the wild thing for the trap. It was a token that he was harking back through his own life to the lives of his forebears; for he was a civilized dog, an unduly civilized dog, and of his own experience knew no trap and so could not of himself fear it.

“I was sent for life. It’s death to come back. There’s been overmuch coming back of late years, and I should of a certainty be hanged if took.”

Only one of the girls that came out with her got away, and she jumped out of a second-story window one night.

“Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting grounds. He will hunt among these hills for the next moon, so he has told me.”

Now get hence, or by the Sambhur that I killed (I eat no starved cattle), back thou goest to thy mother, burned beast of the jungle, lamer than ever thou camest into the world! Go!”

“Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed? No. That is why I teach him these things, and that is why I hit him, very softly, when he forgets.”

“Stay there,” shouted the monkeys, “till we have killed thy friends, and later we will play with thee—if the Poison-People leave thee alive.”

“Look at the marks on his arms and legs. They are the bites of wolves. He is but a wolf-child run away from the jungle.”

“His Majesty had spared us our lives.”