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"I've endured a few knocks but missed worse. I know how lucky I am, and secretly tap wood, greet the day, and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds. The pains and insults are bearable. My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I've learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I'll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes to mind."
Roger Angell
source: "This Old Man: Life in the Nineties," New Yorker, February 17, 2014.
category: aging, memory, survival
medium: Essay
"Chapter books were my salvation, in the same way as Jesus was for other kids. Our family was always broke, but my parents always shelled out our version of a monthly bar bill for Scholastic paperbacks. Thank you, Astrid Lindgren; when you gave us Pippi Longstocking, you gave me life. I read the book like I read the first issue of Ms. magazine ten years later. The experience was like Helen Keller breaking the code for the word 'water.' I wanted to race around spreading the good news. I could breathe again, forever. There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable."
source: "The Prayer of an Unconventional Family," Opinionator, New York Times, November 17, 2012.
category: book, family, reading, religion, survival
via: Beddy Piekiel
"A tree that lives a thousand years might know something about survival."
David Milarch
source: quoted in The Man Who Planted Trees by Jim Robbins (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2012), 8.
category: nature, survival, tree
medium: Nonfiction
"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."
source: Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973), 34.
view on Google Books
category: pain, recovery, survival
medium: Journal
"To have a problem in common is much like love and that kind of love was often the bread that we broke among us. And some of us survived and some of us didn't, and it was sometimes a matter of what's called luck and sometimes a matter of having or not having the gift to endure and the will to."
source: Tennessee Williams: Memoirs (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975), 3.
category: community, death, endurance, love, survival
medium: Memoir
"I had a friend who years before had lost her firstborn when he was an infant, and she told me one of the piercing consolations she received in her early grief was from a man who recognized the fierce loyalty one feels to the dead. 'The real hell of this,' he told her, 'is that you're going to get through it.' Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation."
Gail Caldwell
source: Let's Take the Long Way Home (New York: Random House, 2010), 163.
category: consolation, death, friendship, grief, mourning, survival
"All the books tell you that if the grizzly comes for you, on no account should you run. This is the sort of advice you get from someone who is sitting at a keyboard when he gives it. Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes from you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life."
source: A Walk in the Woods (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 17.
category: advice, bear, grizzly, nature, survival
"The best lesson my mom taught me was how to be scrappy. She was a beauty queen and had her own television show. But for her birthday, she'd buy herself a table saw. She put a roof on our house. My father—great as he is—couldn't pick up a hammer. It was my mom who was up there pounding the shingles in. But more than that, she taught me how to be realistic and survive in weird situations."
source: "What I've Learned: George Clooney," by Cal Fussman, Esquire, December 31, 2004.
category: carpentry, mom, realistic, scrappy, survival, tool
medium: interview
"Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals."
source: Conversations with Don DeLillo (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), p.143.
category: freedom, identity, individuality, survival, writing
medium: letter
notes: This comes from a letter Don DeLillo wrote to Jonathan Franzen