#survival

When did my youth slip away from me? I suddenly thought. It was over, wasn't it? Seemed just like yesterday I was still only half grown up. Huey Lewis and the News had a couple of hit songs then. Not so many years ago. And now here I was, inside a closed circuit, spinning my wheels. Knowing I wasn't getting anywhere but spinning just the same. I had to. Had to keep that up or I wouldn't be able to survive. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#realization #survival #age

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive. ↗

— Yann Martel

#madness #survival #life

I took to the Kingswood the midsummer after the Dame died. I did not swear a vow, but I kept to myself just as strictly, living like a beast in the forest from one midsummer to the next, without fire or iron or the taste of meat. I lived as prey, and I learned from the dogs how to run, from the hare how to hide in the bracken, and from the deer how to go hungry. In sorrow and pride I exiled myself to Kingswood. I shunned fire for I feared the kingsmen would hunt me down, and so by the way of cold and hunger I came near to refusing life itself. I never thought to anger or please a god by it. ↗

— Sarah Micklem

#gods #hiding #hunger #running-away #survival

Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction. ↗

— Scott McCloud

#comics #creativity #human-activity #instincts #reproduction

They forget that we, too, have earned the right to live! So I say if we are going to die, my friend, let us die trying, not sitting. ↗

— Velma Wallis

#athabaskan #courage #inspirational #survival #courage

Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go. ↗

— May Sarton

#nature #pain #strength #survival #business

The problem with living so long is that we get used to it. We watch the mortals age and wither and die around us, watch the world change and decay...but no matter the hardship or the pain or the sorrow we suffer, we choose to continue living. Out of sheer habit, I think. ↗

— Derek Landy

#immortality #loneliness #mortality #regret #survival

You just do it, then if you die, you die. ↗

— T. Scott McLeod

#facing-fear #fear #survival #courage

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... ↗

— Nick Hornby

#life #survival #death

Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn't," I said."So everybody alive must have the Survivor's Syndrome. It's that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors! ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#survivor-syndrome #death