"'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)

"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 (How to Be Good)

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
— Arthur C. Clarke

"The weak die out and the strong will survive, and will live on forever"
— Anne Frank (The Diary of Anne Frank)

"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)

"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

"mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow."
— Joseph Heller

"'The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.'"
— Ursula K. LeGuin

"If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads."
— Sherman Alexie

"If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you."
— Flannery O'Connor

""You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.""
— David Mamet

"Knowledge is power, community is strength and positive attitude is everything"
— Lance Armstrong

"Relax. They're not going to kill us. They're going to TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing."
— Steve Voake (The Dreamwalker's Child)

"As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws."
— Elizabeth Kostova (The Historian)

"I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long."
— Joseph Heller

"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 a ll 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)

"I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving. I was weeping because ....fill in the blank with whatever/whoever helped you survive... had left me so unceremoniously."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi)

"The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"SPIT ALL OVER SOMEONE WITH A MOUTHFUL OF MILK IF YOU WANT TO FIND OUT SOMETHING ABOUT THEIR PERSONALITY FAST."
— Jenny Holzer, SURVIVAL SERIES

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

"The word 'experienced' often refers to someone who's gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have."
— Laurence Gonzales (Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why)

"If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times."
— Wade Davis (The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World)

"Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we're going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don't defeat death, they come to terms with it."
— Laurence Gonzales (Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why)

"The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. . . . A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive--and nowhere else!--and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.
We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race . . . .
The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual."
— Robert A. Heinlein (Starship Troopers)

"We're all put to the test... but it never comes in the form or at the point we would prefer, does it?"
— David Mamet

"One might accept death reasoningly, with every aspect of the conscious mind, but the body was a brute beast that knew nothing of reason."
— Isaac Asimov (Pebble in the Sky)

"People will do amazing things to ensure their survival."
— Patricia Briggs (The Hob's Bargain)

" 'We'll know we've got it right when they choose for themselves," he used to say.
That doesn't make sense.
'That's what I thought too. I asked him what he meant, but he just shrugged. I don't think he knew himself. But I keep thinking maybe that stray is making exactly the kind of choice he talked about. We're talking about an adult dog, a dog that's been out in the woods for a long time, trying to decide whether or not we can be trusted. Whether this is his place. And it matters to him - he'd rather starve than make the wrong decision.' (80)"
— David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle)

"If we survive this, I'll kill both of you. Slowly."
— Sarge, from Red vs Blue

"We wake up one day and find we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days."
— Kent Nerburn

"Adventures are only interesting once you've lived to see the end of them. Before that, they are nothing but fear, and being too cold or too hot or too wet or too hungry, and getting hurt."
— Holly Lisle (The Silver Door)

"I wanted to live! I’ve had so much fun— you know, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, we’re both in there, but you get to a certain age and then if you don’t stop, you’re gonna die. I chose life! I think my fans want to see more records from me. I had reached my quota."
— Ace Frehley

"Life has a way of kicking one along like a football, or so I've found. Fate had never dealt me personally a particularly easy time, but that was OK, that was normal. Most people, it seemed to me, took their turn to be football. Most survived. Some didn't."
— Dick Francis (Straight)

"Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo. "
— Wade Davis (The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World)

"I believe that the only way that the human race is gonna survive is to start colonizing space and setting up colonies on the moon, and then space stations."
— Ace Frehley

"To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such."
— Laurence Gonzales (Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why)

"And Adam ruled, for he was the King. Until the day his will to be King deserted him. Then he died, food for a stronger. And the strongest was always the King, not by strength alone, but King by cunning and luck and strength together. Among the rats."
— James Clavell (King Rat)

"A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass."
— Richard Adams (Watership Down: A Novel)

"Samuel, safety is my watchword. Rest assured that proper procedures will be followed at all times."
Skipper giggled. "Tell me, Mump. What ARE proper procedures exactly?"
"Simple," said Mump. "One: cause maximum chaos in the shortest possible time. Two: try not to get your head blown off."
— Steve Voake (The Web of Fire)

"Such is the privilege of survival: to be allowed to fashion the means that fit our ends, to cobble together a narrative that reveals (as by the divine light of illumination) the predestined arc of our days. This is no small gift. With it we can neutralize all but the greatest losses, reduce even the greatest bastards to nothing more than bit actors in the drama of our lives, put on this earth for the sole purpose of forwarding our cause. Blessed are those who can believe their own stories."
— Mark Slouka (God's Fool)

"She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It would be a kind of test, like surviving on a desert island--but that's what a marriage was, wasn't it? They would have to help each other or die."
— Stewart O'Nan (Songs for the Missing: A Novel)

"'They want us dead,' said Bond calmly. 'So we have to stay alive.'"
— Ian Fleming (Moonraker)