#Survival

"Would you like to know your future?If your answer is yes, think again. Not knowing is the greatest life motivator.So enjoy, endure, survive each moment as it comes to you in its proper sequence -- a surprise."

"We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving."

"I told Ella Mae Cheeks Johnson, then age 105, that she was the only person over 80 who I'd ever met who never referred to her physical infirmities or health problems. To which she replied, "I have my difficulties; I do not rejoice in them."

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give values to survival."

"We could do it, you know.""What?""Leave the district. Run off. Live in the woods. You and I, we could make it."

"Taking a risk to survive isn’t that impressive. Taking a risk to be happy, that takes guts."

"Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who stop to consider the antithesis; that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable."

"War is not for winning, Masha,"sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving."

"Cancer gave me an understanding of the point of all this. To survive. Most of our lives it is easy but for the moments when it becomes difficult, when accident or sickness or sadness strikes, it's just about remembering one thing. You must simply survive."

"Keeping an active mind has been vital to my survival, as has been maintaining a sense of humor."

"Is being burnt a requisite for the making of art? Personally, I don't think it is. But art is poultice for a burn. It is a privilege to have, somewhere within you, a capacity for making something speak from your own seared experience."

"If you truly want to be respected by people you love, you must prove to them that you can survive without them."

"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)"

"Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it."

"Mother can beat me all she wants, but I haven’t let her take away my will to somehow survive."

"Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?"

"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..."

"Humor keeps us alive. Humor and food. Don't forget food. You can go a week without laughing."

"Loving someone always requires you to not love others."

"Mind led bodyto the edge of the precipice.They stared in desireat the naked abyss.If you love me, said mind,take that step into silence.If you love me, said body,turn and exist."