Survival Story Quotes & Sayings

All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher's yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then - still further - of the unavowable horrors that 'fitness' (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.) — Nick Land

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing. — Ann Brashares

It may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a state in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation. — Winston Churchill

[...] what else motivated him to spend hour after hour with me, telling all the details of his story? I quote at length his answer.

"I suffered so much and for so long. Maybe if people read this they will realize that if I can make it,they can make it. Many people suffer only because of what happens in their head; I was also physically being tortured. I had no food. No water. If I can make it so can you. If one depressed person avoids committing suicide then the book is a success.

Be strong. Think positive. If you start to think to the contrary, you are headed to failure. Your mind has to be relaxed as you think about survival. Don't think about death. If you think you are going to die, you will die. You have to survive and think about the future of your life, that life is beautiful! How can you imagine taking your own life? There are challenges and punishment in life but you have to fight! — Jonathan Franklin

I'm interested in reality, and I'm interested in survival. I'm interested in people who aren't the lucky ones, who maybe have a tougher time surviving, and telling their story. — Mary Ellen Mark

The Palestinian mother is the author of the survival story of the Palestinian people. She is the heroine, the one behind the success. — Izzeldin Abuelaish

Why are murder mysteries so popular? There's a 3-part "formula" (if you want to call it that) for a genre novel: (1) Someone the reader likes and relates to (2) overcomes increasingly difficult obstacles (3) to reach an important goal. The more important the goal, the stronger the novel. And the most important goal that any of us have is survival. That's why murder mysteries are more gripping than a story titled "Who Stole My TV Set. — Lois Duncan

Perhaps the only happily ever after is to survive to tell the story — Kat Howard

Every story I do is about people. It's my survival instinct - one person, one story. — John Branch

At times the engine stopped, and grown-ups and children climbed out of the carriages with tins to collect water from the engine steam pipes. This was the only drinking water that we had access to, and though it was hot and very rusty, it was the best drink I felt I'd ever had. — Alfred Nestor

Breaking free is only the beginning. Then begins the painful process of reversing the indoctrination. The longer someone stays in a cult the harder it is for them to remember who they were before the cult took control of their mind. Or in the case of someone like me, a cult-born child, my entire personality was made and created by them. When I left I had no idea who I was. My whole existence, everything I thought I knew, had been a lie.

But it is the psychological aftermath of life in a cult that is all too often the silent killer. — Natacha Tormey

The story of survival is a nice metaphor for our experience making this movie, finding your inner strength and powering through and getting to the endpoint alive. — Katie Aselton

Finally, our new brain needs a purpose. A purpose is expressed as a series of goals. In the case of our biological brains, our goals are established by the pleasure and fear centers that we have inherited from the old brain. These primitive drives were initially set by biological evolution to foster the survival of species, but the neocortex has enabled us to sublimate them. Watson's goal was to respond to Jeopardy! queries. Another simply stated goal could be to pass the Turing test. To do so, a digital brain would need a human narrative of its own fictional story so that it can pretend to be a biological human. It would also have to dumb itself down considerably, for any system that displayed the knowledge of, say, Watson would be quickly unmasked as nonbiological. — Ray Kurzweil

Jews have been an ever-dying people that never died. They have experienced a continuous resurrection, like the dry bones that Ezekiel saw in the valley. This has become the sine qua non of every Jew. It is the mystery of the hidden miracle of survival in the face of overwhelming destruction. Our refusal to surrender has turned our story into one long, unending Purim tale. — Nathan Lopes Cardozo

As he journeyed alone toward the monster that is death, we could do nothing to help him, nor the others still alive; all the words of strength on our lips melted away, our love not great enough to bind them to life, and our hope not enough to will them to live. — Alfred Nestor

A girl about her own age reached out and took hold of her hand. The girl was tall and thin. She had long black hair streaked with red, and the whites of her green eyes stood out against the black coal dust that covered her face. Her blue and white dress hung in tatters, and was blackened by coal dust and smeared with blood. The girl smiled and Rosie could see that in her other hand she was holding her red umbrella. — Denny Taylor

The secret to living fully is to find your passion and pursue it. — Ronald Louis Peterson

The darkest of men carry the brightest of lights — Joe Putignano

In the absence of data, we will always make up stories. In fact, the need to make up a story, especially when we are hurt, is part of our most primitive survival wiring. Mean making is in our biology, and our default is often to come up with a story that makes sense, feels familiar, and offers us insight into how best to self-protect. — Brene Brown

I agree with Varner and Scruton that the more one thinks of one's life as a story that has chapters still to be written, and the more one hopes for achievements yet to come, the more one has to lose by being killed. For this reason, when there is an irreconcilable conflict between the basic survival needs of animals and of normal humans, it is not speciesist to give priority to the lives of those with a biographical sense of their life and a stronger orientation towards the future. — Peter Singer

One woman, called Eva, used to visit my mother and sometimes we would call in next door to visit her. Sometimes Frau Eva gave me cakes and fruit drinks. I remember she was very kind. It was not until many years later that I understood just who she was. To me, at the time, she was just a very nice woman who lived next door sometimes, although she did tend to go away, and was often not seen for several months. — Alfred Nestor

Every good story starts with a simple premise. This one begins with the notion of survival. The determination to live is both instinctive and ferocious. It often encourages compromise with evil. Only the Devil ever benefits from such a bargain. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

Tomorrow is promised to no one so live your life fully everyday. — Therese Crutcher-Marin

Bad things can happen, and often do
but they only take up a few pages of your story; and anyone can survive a few pages. — James A. Owen

When the army doesn't come for you, when no one chooses to fight for you, when no one dives in after you with fairy tales and promises, you write a different story. You write a tale of adventure and chaos, of survival and fortitude, and instead of wishing to be saved, you save yourself. — Kelton Wright

Fear is the short road to death and this world,
Changed by the flux of decay:
Survival is the exception for weary men.

From the new book The Waning — Ellen Mae Franklin

The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death - survival, not only for the story's characters, but often for the society itself. That's why I'm drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they're not technically "war stories." — Steven Pressfield

The negatives he did manage were made in the hour or two when the sun seemed to rally with a yellowy light reminiscent of an egg yolk; usually, it looked pale as a pearl on the steely blue or leaden sky above the snow-scrubbed lake. That's a purple passage fit for a novel but hardly descriptive of the actuality of that winter, which was almost past enduring. — Norman Lock

Helen Tse tells a gripping tale of struggle, laughter, love and food that marks Sweet Mandarin as a must read book. It is not only an immigrant account of life but also a universal touching story of survival that will move your soul as well. — Ken Hom

I'm haunted. We all are, I guess. We're parentless, friendless, unloved, abandoned. The spirits of our deceased emotional anchors and proofs of existence will follow and demean us until we too roam a quiet lifeless world alongside them - unable to speak - our histories written in beach sand. — Jason S. Hornsby

Wood burns. Roots nourish. Branches shelter. Leaves heal." The words had become her mantra, her way of reigniting her courage when it started to falter. My life depends on a tree, she thought wryly as she cinched her pack. — Teresa Tsalaky

It must be one of life's little jokes... how we take everything, even life itself, for granted. We waste our childhoods wishing for what we don't have, longing for the future, dreaming of ways to speed the time so we can hurry up and see the world. And in our later years, we'd give anything just to slow things down and go back to what we once had. — James Michael Rice

Experience is a great teacher, and we were then in her school, and learned that while hope offers the faintest token of refuge, we pause upon the fearful brink of eternity, and look back for rescue. — Fanny Kelly

Had we had all the money in the world to spend and we were doing another studio movie, we probably would have jumped quickly into the Necromonger universe and done an Orpheus Descending movie there. We didn't have that kind of resource. So, we said, this time, "If not that, this time, then what is it? What does this new movie look like?" Quickly, just in talking about it very simply with Vin [Diesel] in his kitchen, we decided on a survival, left-for-dead story, where Riddick could, as a character, reclaim the animal side. — David Twohy

It feels so good to find out I mean everything to the person who means everything to me. — Leslie Lee Sanders

People need stories. Stories of love, hope, survival, wisdom and sometimes pain. Maybe you don't tell them the full truth; maybe you tell them lies. But what is this world? A lie in itself. — Savi Sharma

MATTHEW'S RULES OF SURVIVAL
1. Sometimes, the people who mean you harm are the ones who say they love you.
2. Fear is your friend. When you feel it, act.
3. Protect the little ones.
4. If you coped before, you can cope now.
5. Always remember: In the end, the survivor gets to tell the story. — Nancy Werlin

I would love to do Tammi Terrell's story. I love stories of the underdog coming out on top and stories of survival. — Wendy Raquel Robinson

We're not in a fairytale story. This is not a movie. Scriptwriters don't write our fates. We do. — Ken Marvin Ortega

The art of survival is a story that never ends. — Christian Bale

The survival spirit; either read or write a story. — Lailah Gifty Akita

And I realized more and more that the Armenian story was not so much one of massacre and persecution, as survival. — Philip Marsden

Niaqornat particularly seemed to offer a heightened version of a story being played out across the world about traditional communities' struggle for survival and their attempts to renegotiate their identity in the face of modern life. — Sarah Gavron

Brave young women complete heroic acts everyday, with no one bearing witness. This was a chance to even the ledger, to share one small story the made the difference between starvation and survival for the families whose lives it changed. I wanted to pull the curtain back for readers on a place foreigners know more for its rocket attacks and roadside bombs than its countless quiet feats of courage. And to introduce them to the young women like Kamila Sidiqi who will go on. No matter what. — Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Scars, whether physical or emotional, could be not just a representation of survival but also a story of hope. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

It's one thing to affirm that God is free to do as God wills in this
world. The real crunch comes in allowing God the freedom and
trust to act in one's own life. John Indermark — Lynelle Clark

Have you heard a story where the victim of a kidnap falls in love with the kidnapper?
When the victim is trapped in the world of her captor, she must depend on him for survival. When he treats her gently, she feels as though he is her savior. Although he is in fact the root of all evil.
All I have to do is stretch out my hand gently and you'll fall in love with me. This is the scenario. — Ai Yazawa

My father used to say there are two kinds of people: the noticers and the noticed — Lori Lansens

I remember seeing one elderly man look at us, and he held his hand out, and most frightening were his eyes, dark as a soulless abyss, so black that it looked as if it had been blasted from a cyclone. I felt he was looking right at me. For a moment, I thought I was looking through his sockets, past his brain and behind him; as the tears started rolling down my cheeks a godless universe was expanding within me. Then I became hysterical. — Alfred Nestor

I'm thinking ahead, imagining what our lives together would be like once we're free from this hell and allowed to live and let go. You know? Really let go of our pain and finally enjoy each other ... you and me. — Leslie Lee Sanders

With our collective shock, what we saw seemed to be frozen into a state of suspended animation. Indelibly etched into our memories in terror, forever! My life was in slow motion, it was as if I was no longer in my body and this was a rather bad dream! It is almost impossible to describe with words what I saw, but I will try. This very experience is the one that has continued to shake me awake during the dense night of my lifetime. — Alfred Nestor

The thing I always wanted to say is that surviving abuse sucks. But it's also a choose-your-own-adventure story. — Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

If you dont speak, they will know you know more than you're telling them. And if they know that, they'll find a way to get what you know out of you. Believe me, they'll get everything out, Willie. Don't have any qualms about it
make your story good and make it believable. Silence won't work! This was an expert giving me the best advice she could. From that point on, I worked hard not to remember the people I loved, to try instead to create another life, a false life ... I tried to become a person concerned only with very simple things
and scared. I tried to become the woman I needed to be in order to live. — Diet Eman

For many years eagerly thought by your enemy to destroying your life, it's all one second of mastery for you to save your life from his deadly plans, for you to survive. — Auliq Ice

Paint ghosts over everything, the sadness of everything. We made ourselves cold. We made ourselves snow. We smuggled ourselves into ourselves. Haunted by each other's knowledge. To hide somewhere is not surrender, it is trickery. All day the snow falls down, all night the snow. I try to guess your trajectory and end up telling my own story. We left footprints in the slush of ourselves, getting out of there. — Richard Siken

At the end of the day, we're all striving to be touched, somehow. — Crystal Woods

This is a story about survival.
Letting go and learning to let in.
Getting along and moving on.
The truth about life.
The things left unsaid ... — Nadege Richards

As we passed this living cruelty, I shuddered in momentarily isolation and then let out an audible gasp at what I saw. They were hanging from trees! Some shaking violently, with their intestines hanging out of their bodies! Those who were still partly alive were screaming with pain, and wriggling on the branches trying to get off the ropes ... some had fallen off the branches of the trees, they were crawling along the ground, and towards us. — Alfred Nestor

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up. — James Baldwin

Endurance of life problems, spirit of survival. — Lailah Gifty Akita

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound - something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness - and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Moral of the story: try to get things right, figure out what's going wrong with the scenario, and don't give up. — Cody Lundin

And in reality, I don't think it's a real documentary. It's more a story of her life. It's a story of survival. It's a story of the time in which she lived. The story of success and failure. — Maximilian Schell

In Wright Morris's novel Plains Song, the narrator asks, "Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present?" The question is always open. How we treat our world and each other grows from our vision of how we have come to where we are. Ultimately, of course, the issue is not survival but decency and common sense. Everything passes, the psalmist reminds us. No one escapes. The best we can hope is to learn a little from the speaking dead, to find in our deep past some help in acting wisely in the teeth of life. — Elliott West

Boy, there are people who conquered half the world, slaughtered whole populations, wiped cultures off the face of the planet, and you know what history calls them? Heroes! Kings, presidents, champions, explorers. You think America was settled by white men because the Indians invited us her? No, we took this land because we were stronger, and that's how every page of human history is written. It's just our nature. We're a predator species, top of the food chain. Survival of the fittest is written in our blood, it's stenciled on every gene of our DNA. The strong take and the strong make, and the weak are there only to help them do it. End of story. — Jonathan Maberry

Even the most impassioned devotee of the ghost story would admit that the taste for it is slightly abnormal, a survival, perhaps, from adolescence, a disease of deficiency suffered by those whose lives and imaginations do not react satisfactorily to normal experience and require an extra thrill — L.P. Hartley

It's the ultimate story of survival! Nemo is taken by the enemy, but his father doesn't give up trying to retrieve him. He forms unlikely alliances and conquers his fears to get his son back. Nemo also refuses to remain a prisoner and follows the warrior's code to escape and return to his family unit. — Alanea Alder

I felt so much more than horror. I was so afraid, shocked by what I saw. There were hundreds of men, women and children hanging from the trees ... there was blood everywhere! We all saw that every person had been gutted, like a fish. My instinct was to run, but where to ... I was on a train. As I watched those around me on the train, so many others also looked like they had explosions in their eyes and they too wanted to flee. — Alfred Nestor

I'm always looking for a story of survival. — Dave Pelzer

I quickly got used to being picked up by my mother, and taken to the air raid shelter near our home. Although frightening, this was a great adventure to me as a child, for in the shelter I played with the other children and we felt safe there as we were surrounded by grown-ups; although now the grown-ups were more worried than they had been in the past. There were greater feelings of anxiety and fear in the older people, which we children also felt, and it unsettled us all. — Alfred Nestor

But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else.
Even when there is no one.
A story is like a letter. Dear You, I'll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, like an old love song. — Margaret Atwood

Sweet, loveable, and with every click revealing a new surprise, 'Botanicula' creates both a wonderful world where bees and twigs play in the universe and sets up a daring story of a group of unlikely heroes taking on a tree's last hope of survival. — Rob Manuel

The good people who are publishing this book have a concern that they have expressed to me. The concern is that readers like yourself will read my history of the Baudelaire orphans and attempt to imitate some of the things they do. So at this point in the story, in order to mollify the publishers - the word 'mollify' here means 'get them to stop tearing their hair out in worry' - please allow me to give you a piece of advice, even though I don't know anything about you. The piece of advice is as follows: If you ever need to get to Curdled Cave in a hurry, do not, under any circumstances, steal a boat and attempt to sail across Lake Lachrymose during a hurricane, because it is very dangerous and the chance of your survival are practically zero. — Lemony Snicket