To harden the earth the rocks took charge: instantly they grew wings: the rocks that soared: the survivors flew up the lightning bolt, screamed in the night, a watermark, a violet sword, a meteor. The succulent sky had not only clouds, not only space smelling of oxygen, but an earthly stone flashing here and there changed into a dove, changed into a bell, into immensity, into a piercing wind: into a phosphorescent arrow, into salt of the sky.
There will always be survivors.
This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.
In the ordinary, everyday understandings of the words involved, to say that someone survived death is to contradict yourself; while to assert that all of us live forever is to assert a manifest falsehood, the flat contrary of a universally known truth: namely, the truth that all human beings are mortal. For when, after some disaster, the 'dead' and the 'survivors' have both been listed, what logical space remains for a third category?
I don't always burn my bridges, but when I do, I like there to be no survivors.
All the survivors of the war had reached their homes and so put the perils of battle and the sea behind them.
We were fortunate enough to have several good books detailing the camps and the women. Some were by the survivors. I also got to talk to some of the women who had been in the camp, survivors.
Rather than deal with problems in relationships, I've always moved on. That's why I'm one of the very few survivors as a woman, you know.
One of many problems with survey research in general is that you can only survey the survivors. In other words, if you were to do a survey of people who were known to have played Russian Roulette and you sent out the questions before the time they were going to play and then you come back six months after they played Russian Roulette, you would probably discover that among the people who did come back there was no harm done.
We do not invest in victims, we invest in survivors.
Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure.
After eighty, there are no enemies, only survivors.
To all the survivors out there, I want them to know that we are stronger and more resilient than we ever knew. We survived, that should be enough but it isn't. We must work hard to become whole again, to fill our soul with love and inspiration, to live the life that was intended for us before it was disrupted by war and horrors, and help rebuild a world that is better than the one we had just left.
Only fools pity survivors their scars and you should never kowtow to fools
Many stroke survivors look back on their attack as a stroke of luck. Of course, by luck they mean horrible paralysis.
I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through.
Many survivors insist they're not courageous: 'If I were courageous I would have stopped the abuse. ' 'If I were courageous, I wouldn't be scared'. . . Most of us have it mixed up. You don't start with courage and then face fear. You become courageous because you face your fear.
As the son of Holocaust survivors, this is life - you're put in a corner, and you have to get out. I believe that you can always get out.
But here, in the murk of conflagration, where scarcely a friend is left to know we, the survivors, do not flinch from anything, not from a single blow. Surely the reckoning will be made after the passing of this cloud. We are the people without tears, straighter than you. . . more proud.
We are survivors from the moment of diagnosis.
