Quotes & Sayings About Staying Alive

This isn't a question of odds. Of all the men in the world, that woman hose you. If she's still out there, she's waiting for you. Staying alive any way she can until you find her. — Justin Cronin

What terrified her most was the thought that staying alive had become nothing more than a habit. That was it. A reflex action without further or deeper purpose. — Jonathan Maberry

At the Hospital, everyone thinks about dying.And I'd never been much for romanticizing death-especially not suicide. I'd always been a fan of staying alive.
After all, you basically do all you can not to die. All the time. The search for immortality isn't just from storybooks. every day you do it. You buckle your seat-belt, you take vitamin supplements, look both was before you cross the street. And you really think your doing all you can. Bullshit. We can lift weights for fucking hours and we're still going to die. — Hannah Moskowitz

Do as I have taught you, and you will stay alive. — George S. Patton

Living is not merely a matter of staying alive, is it? It is what you do with your life and the fact of your survival that counts. — Mary Balogh

Staying alive was what we did to pass the time. — Meg Rosoff

I've always done 20 things at once. It's my way of staying alive, not to keep one dish cooking, but several dishes going. And I'm pretty organized. — Patrice Leconte

Anger is needed to leave, to walk. That doesn't come from outside. In the hollow of the belly the pain of being here, the impossibility of remaining where you are, of being buried alive, of simply staying. — Frederic Gros

I scored a movie called 'Endangered Species'. I worked on another movie called 'Staying Alive'. A German film called 'Fire and Ice'. — Gary Wright

We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still. — Terry Pratchett

The dreams now were simply of staying alive. — John Marsden

When you start you're trying to achieve staying alive and getting home. If you can do both of those, then you stand a chance of breaking the record. — Ellen MacArthur

I only eat so that I can smoke and stay alive. — Harry Dean Stanton

We all knew that we could grieve only for a short while in order to continue staying alive. — Ishmael Beah

Wisdom and love have nothing to do with each other. Wisdom is staying alive, survival. You're wise if you don't stick your finger in the light plug. Love - you'll stick your finger in anything. — Robert Altman

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Taylor clapped her hands three times for attention. Ladies! Ladies! My stars! That's enough. Now. We all know Miss Arkansas's girls are fake, miss Ohio's easier than making cereal, and Miss Montana's dress is something my blind meemaw would wear to bingo night. And Miss New Mexico
aren't you from the chill-out state? Maybe you can channel up some new-age-Whole-Foods-incense calm right about now, because we have a big job ahead called staying alive. — Libba Bray

Thoughts and sorrows seem to have remained on the other side of the mountains. Between tormented men and hateful deeds, a person has to think and sorrow so much! Back there it is so difficult and so desperately important to find a reason for staying alive. How else should a person go on living? Sheer misery makes one profound. — Hermann Hesse

Because they are living creatures and that means they have to work to stay alive. Staying alive always has a dark side. — Jayne Castle

Its not staying alive, its being alive — J.A. Mock

Who else is going?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Just you and me."
My mood promptly shot up past 'cheerful' and went straight to 'estatic.' Me and Dimitri. Alone. In a car. This might very well be worth a surprise test.
"How far is it?" Silently, I begged for it to be a really long drive. Like, one that would take a week. And would involve us staying overnight in luxury hotels. Maybe we'd get stranded in a snowbank, and only body heat would keep us alive.
"Five hours"
"Oh."
A bit less than I'd hoped for. Still, five hours was better than nothing. It didn't rule out the snowbank possibility, either. — Richelle Mead

The bad smell around the transfer of lucre was that it smacked of providing for her after my death. Neither of us could quite keep that out. Therefore we gave it its moment in the spotlight. I plan on staying alive, I said. But in case I don't you'll have what you need. Just promise me you'll always buy beautiful underwear. You drive a hard bargain, she said, but okay. — Glen Duncan

No, you misunderstand, Madame Prime Minister. I'm not just good at staying alive. I'm also really, really good at drugging people. - Grace — Ally Carter

Staying alive is not enough to guarantee survival. Development is the best way to ensure survival. — Liu Cixin

I am just working on staying alive. — Frank Bruno

My main concern while in New York wasn't becoming a hot shot. I was more concerned with staying alive, and that took all the pleasure out of the experience. I didn't know where to find a grocery store so I subsisted on hot dogs, peanuts and whatever else I could buy from a street vendor. I didn't know how to hail a cab (apparently there's an art to it). I stood on the edge of the sidewalk and waved my arms around but no one stopped, so I limited my entire universe to however far I could walk and I never walked too far because I was afraid I'd get lost and never find my way back home again. Perhaps that's why there are so many homeless people in New York; maybe they're not really lost, maybe some of them have homes but they just don't know how to get there. — Marlin Bressi

Stay alive, stay active, and get as much practice as you can. — Frank Sinatra

Surviving is a basic thing. Getting by. Staying alive in whatever way we can. It doesn't mean we make right choices or drive fine cars or have good jobs. It means we found a way not to die. I survived. — Carolyn Wall

Why is it acceptable to do such horrible things in the name of staying alive? Would it not have been better had I died with my innocence intact? — Michel Templet

Footsteps are the wonders of staying alive to move forward — Munia Khan

Little Pessimism in life reminds of staying alive and not wandering in a fairy land. — Vikram Adhikari

If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?" he had asked in the great essay on dirty postcards. "Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. — George Orwell

I've been so busy staying alive I never thought of what this must be like for my parents. — Andy Weir

Accidents happen. Our bones shatter, our skin splits, our hearts break. We burn, we drown, we stay alive. — Moira Fowley-Doyle

Leadership is about keeping toilets flushing," the Admiral once said. "Unless you're on the battlefront. Then it's about staying alive. Neither are pleasant. — Neal Shusterman

Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere though of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds
in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won't mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.
As a species were doomed by hope, then?
You could call it hope. That, or desperation.
But we're doomed without hope, as well, said Jimmy.
Only as individuals, said Crake cheerfully. — Margaret Atwood

The pleasure of being alive is brought into sharper focus when you need to pay attention to staying alive. — Richard Louv

If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive. — John Irving

The Testing is no longer filled with excitement for the opportunity to help the Commonwealth rebuild. The Testing is now about staying alive. — Joelle Charbonneau

Fear is strange. It settles on chests and seeps through skin, through layers of tissue, muscle, and bone and collects in a soul-sized black hole, sucking the joy out of life, the pleasure, the beauty. But not the hope. Somehow, the hope is the only thing resistant to the fear, and it is that hope that makes the next breath possible, the next step, the next tiny act of rebellion, even if that rebellion is simply staying alive. — Amy Harmon

It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other — George Orwell

Your staying alive means so much more than you really know or that anyone is aware of at this moment. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life. — George Orwell

[Solitary confinement] is terrible. That is terrible. You're in a grave. You can't do anything. Everything's brought to you and you're in a room all day, except to come out of the showers. So when I would come out, I would entertain myself by singing, doing little mock concerts. And then when I was in the room, I would develop a routine. Like I have a lot of hair under here, so I would take my hair down and take all day to braid it on purpose. Stretch the hours out. Then I might write. And I would clean the floor. And I would look out the window. And then I'd devote a whole day to just reading. I was Christian then, trying to be. So I would read the whole Bible. I would break it down into sections. You're in a grave and you're trying to live. That's how to best describe it: trying to live in a grave. You're trying to live 'cause you're not dead yet, but nobody hears you when you call out, 'Hey, I'm alive! — Megan Sweeney

Learning appears as a way of staying young, perhaps of staying alive, and also as a way of growing up, perhaps facing death. — Richard Wollheim

After a while, just staying alive becomes a full-time job. No wonder we need a vacation. — Michael Zadoorian

For us, it's a matter of just staying alive and getting the best deal we can now. Eventually, this will all straighten out. It may be two generations away or 10 generations away, but time is irrelevant in that sense. As long as we, as a people, stay alive, we will survive. — John Trudell

I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn't be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life. — Hubert Selby Jr.

The big man shrugged, "I don't know. You're pretty good with the cards. Tell me what the odds are."
[She] shifted her gaze to Michael, then back at Hollis. "This isn't a question of odds. Of all the men in the world, that woman chose you. If she's still out there, she's waiting for you. Staying alive any way she can until you find her. That's all that matters."
Everybody waited for what Hollis would next say. "You're a real ball-buster, you know that? ... Let me pack a few things. — Justin Cronin

But we live in an age, ladies and gentlemen, where we are keeping morons alive in our gene pools by putting warnings on items that should not require warnings. The hotel I am staying in has a hair dryer, on the cord of the hair dryer there is a warning and this is what it says: "Warning! Do not use in shower!" Ladies and gentlemen if you have a friend who wants to use their hair dryer in the shower, you let them. — Wil Anderson

I'm not the healthiest, but I am healthy. I'm healthy to the point where there are things that I have to eat that I don't want to eat, but I eat it because I'm enjoying staying alive. — Bill Cosby

The sky is fucking with me. It's one of those militantly perfect spring days, the kind that seems to be trying just a little too hard, the kind you want to smack in the face, and the sky is bluer than it has any right to be, really, an obnoxious, overbearing blue that implies that staying home is a crime against humanity. Like I've got anywhere to go. The neighborhood is alive with gardeners mowing lawns and trimming hedges, the mechanized hiss of twirling sprinklers and for those just joining us, it's a beautiful day and Hailey is dead and I have nothing to do, nowhere to be. — Jonathan Tropper

Yes, I'm alive," Mat said. "I'm usually pretty good at staying alive. I've only failed one time that I can remember, and it hardly counts. — Robert Jordan

This afternoon it rains as never before; and I
don't feel like staying alive, heart. This afternoon is pleasant. Why shouldn't it be?
It is wearing grace and pain; it is dressed like a woman. — Cesar Vallejo

Killing people is easier than it should be." Dad put on his beret. "Staying alive is harder. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The function of staying alive is automatic, living your life is not, living takes knowing what you are doing and where you are going. — Mark Quam

I sure hope you're staying alive for the upcoming Dodgers series. — Jerry Coleman

My ambitions at this point are modest and mostly surround staying alive. — David Foster Wallace

God is like a lover. Sometimes he gives you so much pain that staying alive seems like a punishment but in the next moment he shows you so much love, affection and care that you forget all your pains. Yes, the wounds can't be healed completely but god compensates it with other happiness. — Mayank Kashyap

I don't have a lot to look forward to when I finally die. I'll either wake up a crazed vampire, who will seek out the people I love, to eat them. Or, I get to enjoy an eternity of torture and torment in hell. Love the options. So, I did everything I could to stay alive. You'd be surprised what you will do when you know what waited for you when you died. — L.A. Kennedy

He could see the inchworm in his mind even now, that snip of green elastic with it's tiny blunt legs, coiling and stretching its way toward the tabletop, on a mission whose nature was a mystery. Survival, he understood now - that was all. That contracting and straining, that frantic rearing-up to look around: It was nothing less than the urgent business of staying alive. — Julie Orringer

Attack, voracious
eating, and flight:
it's a sound routine
for staying alive on edges. — Margaret Atwood

I drop the other Chest to the ground in shock. "What number are you? I'm Four."
He squints at me and then offers his hand. "I'm Nine. Good job staying alive, Number Four. — Pittacus Lore

Survival is staying alive one breath at a time. p. 251 — Frank Herbert

Still, a thrill raced through her when she thought about the one thing she would have. Camille wrapped her arms around Oscar's waist and held him, breathing in his distinctive scent. It was such a small detail about him. She wanted to discover all the small details about him, and now she could.
"Don't ever die again," Camille whispered, pressing her cheek against the hard muscle of his shoulder.
"I'll give staying alive my best shot. On one condition." He lifted her chin up to look him in the eye. "Choose me."
Choice. She'd always had it, but strangely a life without the soft padding of money and reputation made her feel as though she had more freedom than ever. She could do whatever she wanted to do, be whoever she wanted to be. And the only person she wanted to find her way with was Oscar.
"I already have," she whispered, running her hands up his arms and over his broad shoulders. — Angie Frazier

I'm a believer that you accomplish much, much more with direct relationships than by using an intermediary. And that cash you keep in the bank can be the difference between staying alive as a small business, or not. — Mark Cuban

With, or despite our scars, we stay alive. — Marilyn Hacker

That's it ... I'm completely giving up on boys and concentrating on staying alive. — Samantha Young

Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake. — Jonathan Franzen

He killed, his sword shearing, shield and horse a ram, pushing in, and further in, opening a space by force alone for the momentum of the men behind him. Beside him a man fell to a spear in the throat. To his left, an equine scream as Rochert's horse went down.
In front of him, methodically, men fell, and fell, and fell.
He split his attention. He swept a sword cut aside with his shield, killed a helmed soldier, and all the while flung out his mind, waiting for the moment when Touar's lines split open. The most difficult part of commanding from the front was this
staying alive in the moment, while tracking in his mind, critically, the whole fight. Yet it was exhilarating, like fighting with two bodies, at two scales. — C.S. Pacat

Sentience is not an end in itself. It is a means to the end of staying alive. Sentient beings use sensations of pain and suffering to escape situations that threaten their lives and sensations of pleasure to pursue situations that enhance their lives. Just as humans will often endure excruciating pain in order to remain alive, animals will often not only endure but inflict on themselves excruciating pain - as when gnawing off a paw caught in a trap - in order to live. Sentience is what evolution has produced in order to ensure the survival of certain complex organisms. To claim that a being who has evolved to develop a consciousness of pain and pleasure has no interest in remaining alive is to say that conscious beings have no interest in remaining conscious, a most peculiar position to take. — Gary L. Francione

[i]We were fighting so very hard and achieving so very little aside from staying alive. BUT THAT'S EVERYTHING, my father wrote to me, when I told him that in a letter.[/i] — Helen Oyeyemi

While the Sun is setting, we realise that we have survived today as well and we thank to our mind, to our luck and to the universe! All these three made this miracle possible! Yes, staying alive is a miracle! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

You're young," Teft said. "I'm old."
"That makes you wiser, presumably?"
"Damnation no. The only thing it proves is that I've more experience staying alive than you. — Brandon Sanderson

As the show's executive producer, I envisioned something akin to "Gilligan's Island" meets Lord of the Flies meets Ten Little Indians mets "The Real World." "Survivor" marks a return to a core element of adventure: staying alive. — Mark Burnett

I mean obviously, staying alive is pretty fucking important . . . but there's got to be something beyond that, right? — Isaac Marion

I was afraid to fall asleep, but staying awake also brought back painful memories. Memories I sometimes wish I could wash away, even though I am aware that they are an important part of what my life is; who I am now. I stayed up all night, anxiously waiting for daylight, so that I could fully return to my new life, to rediscover happiness I had known as a child, the joy that had stayed alive inside me even through times when being alive itself became a burden. These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past. — Ishmael Beah

Women do not avoid fighting because they are dainty or scared, but because they have a greater stake than men in staying alive to rear their offspring. Women compete with each other just as tenaciously as men, but with a stealth and subtlety that reduces their chances of being killed or injured. — Anne Campbell

The hurt means you're alive. It means your body is reacting and willing to fight - both to fight back and fight through it. So rather than running from grief's harsh reality, you may find that in letting it groan and pierce and ache and cry, you begin to exhaust some of its staying power. You expose its secret hiding places. You force it into the open air where it can be more easily outlined and dealt with. — Frank Page

The strength of a tree, the old ones say, comes not from growing thicker in the good years when there is water, but from staying alive in the bad, dry times. — Joseph M. Marshall III

As time went by, matters improved; the armies, especially the British and French Armies, became better at staying alive while killing larger numbers of the enemy which, though hardly a matter for satisfaction in human terms, is what well-trained armies are supposed to do. — Robin Neillands

The American system of civilian control of the military recognizes that soldiers' attention must be fixed on winning battles and staying alive, and that the fog of war can sometimes obscure the rule of law. — Andrew Rosenthal

The wrestling, even though I would only wrestle for 15 or 20 or 30 minutes at a time, and it would look like that was the only time I was in it, was really a 24-hour job. Keeping yourself alive, reinventing yourself, staying physically in shape, the traveling, all the other commitments with being a wrestler, it was a crossover situation where it became sports entertainment and you actually became a media star, so it was very demanding. — Laila Ali

Whom shall I call on? Who will share with me The wretched happiness of staying alive? — Sergei Yesenin

It's this or a short hospital stay," she said, greeting Scarlett with a raised glass of a deep red liquid with a celery stalk sticking out of the top. "Bloody Marys are one of the truly medicinal cocktails. The only way I can beat this jet lag is by staying up all day, and this is going to keep me alive. And who is this?"
This was directed at Marlene, who was stalking along behind Scarlett like a wet cat. — Maureen Johnson

One thing I'm not going to do is chase staying alive. You spend so much time chasing staying alive, you won't live. — Patrick Swayze

When I first came up, the whole AIDS epidemic was starting, and the gay community that I experienced from the beginning of my career was mostly - and overwhelmingly - concerned with staying alive. And, also, I felt really aware of the preciousness of life and time. The gay community and people who were HIV-positive were treated so badly, and I was very disturbed by things. But I also saw a lot of love and connection in the gay community at that time. — Madonna Ciccone

Inspiring passion in family and friends has more enduring value than just staying alive for them. — Alex Lowe

A house is such a strange thing. Everything else gets more worn when people handle it, and sometimes you can feel a person's poison if you get too close to him, but that's not what happens to a house. Even a good house falls apart quickly when nobody stops by. A house is alive only when there are people living in it, brushing against it, staying in it. — Kyung-Sook Shin

You just don't have the heart to kill?"
"I have the heart to do what I have to do." He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. "In the beginning it was about staying alive. Then it was about protecting my brothers and sisters from the crazies running around after the plague first hit. Then it was about protecting my territory and supplies ... "
"What's it about now?" I asked quietly. That was the first time I'd seen him even mildly worked up.
"It settles my nerves," he admitted with an embarrassed shrug. "Gives me something to do. — Rick Yancey

What are we going to do about the injuries to our country still going on right in front of our eyes? It gets me out of bed in the morning. It makes me mad enough to get my blood up and want to get out there with [Mark] Twain and get it said and that is why I still hit the road and go out on the stage and keep working at staying alive. — Hal Holbrook

Worry about staying alive first. Then worry about how you're going to live. — Richelle Mead

I was interested in staying alive, and in order to stay alive, we have to do things we don't like. — Fabio Geda

It's purely and simply the unfair media.They want the story to stay alive as long as possible. — Donald Trump

Robin: Golden arrow? And what would we do with a golden arrow? Give it to Alan for a lute string? I could hang it around my neck on a chain, perhaps, and let it stab me in the ribs when I tried to sit.
Marian: And your honour as an outlaw?
Robin: My honour as an outlaw concerns staying alive; and presenting my neck anywhere near the Sheriff of Notingham, who feels it wants lengthening, runs directly counter to that honour.
Marian: The sheriff will be gravely disappointed.
Robin: That's the best news I've heard all week. — Robin McKinley

Staying alive, as it turns out, is mostly common sense. — Judy Melinek

I had a story-telling mother; she's written novels and short stories. So I feel like maybe I'm staying alive by telling tales. — Ayshay

...what was important, what mattered, was not the fact of being afraid, but what you did, the choices you made, when you were afraid. And maybe that was something to do with being alive--or staying dead. — Graham Gardner

The problem with small pressure vessels is CO2 toxicity. You can have all the oxygen in the world, but once the CO2 gets above 1 percent, you'll start to get drowsy. At 2 percent, it's like being drunk. At 5 percent, it's hard to stay conscious. Eight percent will eventually kill you. Staying alive isn't about oxygen, it's about getting rid of CO2. — Andy Weir

What was your greatest challenge? Staying alive as a business, staying ahead of the game, and melding my business life with my personal life. — Lillian Vernon