Survival Quotes

“No. I can survive well enough on my own— if given the proper reading material.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“We could do it, you know."
"What?"
"Leave the district. Run off. Live in the woods. You and I, we could make it.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“We’ll never survive!”
“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“If you truly want to be respected by people you love, you must prove to them that you can survive without them.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Infinity Sign

“No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.

Or you don't.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“Temper us in fire, and we grow stronger. When we suffer, we survive.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire

“What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can't move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won't be troubling you much longer.”
― Douglas Adams, The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts

“We each survive in our own way.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass

“Humor keeps us alive. Humor and food. Don't forget food. You can go a week without laughing.”
― Joss Whedon

“Passion is...it's fire. And fire is great, man. But we're made of water. Water is how we keep living. Water is what we need to survive.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

“I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“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

“You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don't have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn't mean they apply to you.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

“The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

“I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day."

(Interview with The Booklovers blog, September 2010)”
― Gail Carriger

“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, Life of Pi

“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.”
― Leon C. Megginson

“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, Journal of a Solitude

“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“In the end, what matters is this: I survived.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“Most of us can hide our greatest hurts and longings. It’s how we survive each day. We pretend the pain isn’t there, that we are made of scars instead of wounds.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“To have endured horrors, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that honorable and brave— that was magical.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“You are enough to drive a saint to madness or a king to his knees.”
― Grace Willows, To Kiss a King