Survival Mode Quotes

She took his verbal punches and she felt silenced under the mental prison that he had held her in. She looked perfect on the outside, but her body expressed her pain. Her soul was crystallized, permanently on survival-mode. He thought he was smart, but he had no idea that he was married to a lotus. She rose every time because she knew he could not take away her worth. She knew she was meant to have more. She loved herself through the horror, and regained her ability to keep walking, to keep breathing, to keep living. She rose peacefully like the lotus, elegant and full of class, untouched by his filthy, meaningless existence... and that had always left him powerless. ~ Karen A. Baquiran

The masculine energy was about survival. The male was the hunter who risked his life and had to be in the fight-flight mode. ~ Deepak Chopra

People are all vulnerable in so many different ways. We go into survival mode a lot of times. ~ Malin Akerman

Usually right when I'm feeling it, right when it's happening, I always find I need to be in some sort of survival mode or mature mom mode, so it always seems to come later that I have the breakdown. ~ Natalie Maines

The experience of childhood sexual abuse leaves some survivors with a high tolerance for pain. Dysfunctional environments require endurance and thick skin. Child survivors sometimes have to commit to sticking things out in order to survive. This pattern of tolerance follows you into adulthood. Instead of using pain as a signal to evaluate and change direction, you may use pain as a signal to try harder. Try harder to please someone. Try harder to control your children. Try harder to be a good friend. Try harder to be successful at a job that you hate. You remain in survival mode that you picked up as a child. Your high tolerance for pain keeps you committed to dysfunctional experiences and relationships that recycle pain from the past. Sometimes, the only way out of this cycle is time in isolation to learn what peace feels like. Sometimes you have to be willing to let go of everything in order to learn how to hold onto anything. ~ Rosenna Bakari

The most vital weapons at the disposal of a special forces soldier are his intellect and his mental toughness. Sometimes it all comes down to 'who wants it most', i.e. whoever is more willing to keep fighting and trying to survive. Being able to keep your head and look for advantages or escape routes is a big plus too.
Getting into 'survival mode' requires shifting mental gears when you need to. Good training helps with this as well as giving you the skills you need, but ultimately the will that drives your bid to survive is yours.
If you give in to fear or go into denial, pretending that it is not happening, then you will fail. Instead you must accept that it IS really happening and deal with it. So if you find yourself thinking, "What's he going to do to me?', you have to force yourself to answer, 'Nothing. I'm not going to let him.'
If you have done all you can to avoid trouble and it finds you anyway, then it is down to you to make a way out of the situation with as little harm to yourself as possible. Yes, you will be scared. Yes, you might indeed get hurt. Yes, it is possible that you could fail to defend yourself... but not for lack of trying. If the bad guy will not let you withdraw or de-escalate the situation, if he insists on fighting then he has decided that someone is going to get hurt. But it is you, not him, that gets to decide who. ~ Martin J. Dougherty

The things that prey on my mind in London seem to disappear as soon as I find myself in a different environment. Survival mode kicks in. ~ Hayley Atwell

Self-mutilation is a very different issue to suicide. It is a controlled pain personal to you, allowing you to live/exist to some degree. ~ Richy Edwards

A lot of times high school felt like a shipwreck. A social shipwreck with everyone in desperate survival mode and only one lifeboat. Everyone fighting for a seat, clinging to the sides and beating each other with oars to keep their spot. I can't stand that kind of chaos, when people create drama for the sake of it. ~ Suanne Laqueur

Survival mode is supposed to be a phase that helps save your life. It is not meant to be how you live. ~ Michele Rosenthal

is this what it is to be a mother who has to carry the weight of having to protect her children in a world that is conspiring to kill them? Are you forced to exist within a terrible trinity of emotion: rage, grief of guilt? What of the joy and the peace that loving a child brings? What of pride and of hope? Could it really be true that my mother has been given no door number four or five or six or even seven to walk through in order to know the wholeness of motherhood? Is she one in a long line of Black mothers limited to survival mode or grief? ~ Patrisse Khan-Cullors

Or maybe it was survival mode they both lived in, and they didn't dare allow anyone else in because if they were ripped apart a second time there would be no fixing either of them ~ Christine Feehan

The habits you created to survive will no longer serve you when it's time to thrive. Get out of survival mode. New habits. New Life. ~ Ebonee Davis

Life Is an Ambiguous Stimulus

In a very real sense, life is an ambiguous stimulus. Does survival of a heart attack indicate that death is imminent or that one has been given a new lease on life? Is falling in love an assurance of a lifelong partnership or the first sign of an inevitable heartbreak? Many human situations are complex and their meanings subtle. Thus, to make sense of and gain agency over our experiences, we engage in the process of self-reflection.
Through self-reflection, people come to realize that their lives are filled with uncertainty about their own identities, their relationships with others, and their environmental circumstances. Because living involves adaptation to irregular changes and perturbations from the environment, the process of self-reflection reveals the indefinite nature of life. The uncertainty stemming from threatening stimuli whose nature is unknown or unpredictable evokes stress and a sense of loss of control. In response to uncertainty, we are driven to make meaning of our experiences and in so doing to reduce uncertainty. Indeed, a series of cunning experiments demonstrated that the sense of lacking control promotes illusory pattern perception in ambiguous situations. Hence, people consciously or unconsciously attempt to regain a sense of control by projecting patterns onto the chaos of their lives. This meaning-making process hinged on the appraisal of stressors and their meaningful integration into our autobiographica ~ Todd Kashdan

Creating the characters is the most creative part of the novel except for the language itself. There I am, sitting in front of my computer in right-brain mode, typing the things that come to mind - which become the seeds of plot. It's scary, though, because I always wonder: Is it going to be there this time? ~ Elizabeth George

Order is a prerequisite of survival; therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution. ~ Rudolf Arnheim

What I want to say here is that there is a place beyond control and beyond concern that people can go, where the values and the needs of everyday life change completely. Where what matters is moment-to-moment survival to avoid mind pain. ~ Dan Fante

You may be operating from the belief that you must do everything yourself because no one will ever be there for you.
Or you may think that if you never speak up you'll avoid being rejected. Both these fears no longer apply to you today as an adult.
If you never reach out for help, you will continue to deprive yourself. ~ Beverly Engel

The failure mode of clever is "asshole. ~ John Scalzi

Maybe hope springs eternal in the whale's heart too. I don't know. If you look at the history of species there seems to be no selective advantage to intelligence. It's the microbes who have totally ignored selection for three and a half billion years that remain with us and probably will remain. They seem almost immortal. The process of evolution appears to be about specialization and adaptation and yet these are the very things that seem ultimately to mediate against survival itself. ~ Cormac McCarthy

The captain looked defensive. "You regard our customs as primitive?"
Every society to its own tastes, captain. The wisdom of one society would be folly for another. Who is qualified to judge? Only the universe, which passes the judgment of survival on all peoples. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

I know it's not good to be weak and helpless. But I don't think it's good to be too strong either. In our society, they talk about survival of the fittest. But we're not animals. We're human. ~ Natsuki Takaya

Our sense of self, formulated in large part by the untold number of cross-related connections that we make with our physical, social, and family environments, is reliant upon fitting into our social fabric. The educational environment, family relationships, peer groups, books, television, films, music, along with an assortment of other cultural events shape our emergent persona. Our successes and failures interacting in the world leave their collective imprint upon the wet clay of our forming brains. We are sentimental creatures who cling to past memories. We are inquisitive critters who venture forth from our protective dens to explore new territory. We are perceptive organisms equipped with five basic senses. We are sentient beings who can consciously organize our sense impressions into guiding ideas and useful principles. Our survival responses form a central cord of our emotions. We are receptive, compassionate beings that respond with both body and mind to global stimuli. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

As part of Depeche Mode, I don't think it's right for me to be using my own songs for a solo project. I'm not a very prolific songwriter, so I keep those for Depeche Mode. ~ Martin Gore

We are men and women from many lands, representing a rich variety of cultures. And we have been brought together to work in a great common cause: the survival and progress of mankind. The concept of unity in diversity ... underlies our various pursuits at the United Nations. ~ Kurt Waldheim

The flames had passed over those flattened blades and consumed their heather neighbours on either side while they themselves had remained, made proof against the blaze and guaranteed their stark survival just by their earlier oppression. ~ Iain Banks

The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course _à la mode_. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Now actions vary according to the manner of their performance. Take, for example, that which we are now doing, drinking, singing and talking these actions are not in themselves either good or evil, but they turn out in this or that way according to the mode of performing them; and when well done they are good, and when wrongly done they are evil; and in like manner not every love, but only that which has a noble purpose, is noble and worthy of praise. ~ Plato

Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I may have stumbled
and stammered at
your unexpected push,
but the breeze
anchored me
and I learnt the
art of survival ~ Vijaya Gowrisankar

LOUIS SACHAR is the author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Holes, winner of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Christopher Award. He is also the author of Stanley Yelnats' Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake; Small Steps, winner of the Schneider Family Book Award; and The Cardturner, a Publishers Weekly Best Book, a Parents' Choice Gold Award recipient, and an ALA-YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults book. His books for younger readers include There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom, The Boy Who Lost His Face, Dogs Don't Tell Jokes, and the Marvin Redpost series, among many others. ~ Louis Sachar

Funny that survival might hinge on being stupider than your enemy. ~ Joey Graceffa

The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a projection of 1950s marital norms onto the past. ~ Stephanie Coontz

The only attribute of a point is that it marks position. Take away this attribute and in the unposited point we have a symbol of pure Being, the abstract noumenon, that which underlies every mode of phenomenal manifestation, every form of existence. It is at once All and Nothing, at once Absolute Consciousness and Unconsciousness. All - since it contains the potentiality of everything, past, present, and to come. Nothing - since having no form, no limit, it is non- existent, quoad nos. It is Consciousness itself, and yet it is unconscious according to our conception of consciousness, for there is nothing beside itself for it to be conscious of - no differentiation of subject and object. That Being must exist ~ Anonymous

A quick turn around a corner
and my planet becomes sand
on the shore of a dying Universe ~ S. Kelley Harrell

Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development. We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in '54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Stay in the game and stay alive. ~ Joe Teti

Here's the bottom line, we're either going or not. ~ Joe Teti

I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road. ~ Stanley Kunitz

But the period I studied -- the rollicking eighteenth century engraved by Hogarth -- was the one that saw the birth of America, of women's rights, and of the novel. The novel started as a low-class form, fit only to be read by serving maids, and it is the only literary form where women have distinguished themselves so early and with such excellence that even the rampant misogyny of literary history cannot erase them. Ever wonder about women and the novel? Women, like any underclass, depend for their survival on self-definition. The novel permitted this -- and pages could still be hidden under the embroidery hoop.
From the writer's mind to the reader's there was only the intervention of printing presses. You could stay at home, yet send your book abroad to London -- the perfect situation for women.
In a world where women are still the second sex, many still dream of becoming writers so they can work at home, make their own hours, nurse the baby. Writing still seems to fit into the interstices of a woman's life. Through the medium of words, we have hopes of changing our class. Perhaps the pen will not always be equated with the penis. In a world of computers, our swift fingers may yet win us the world. One of these days we'll have class. And so we write as feverishly as only the dispossessed can. We write to come into our own, to build our houses and plant our gardens, to give ourselves names and histories, inventing ourselves as we go along. ~ Erica Jong

We need to move beyond Darwinian Theory, which stresses the importance of individuals, to one that stresses the importance of the community. British scientist Timothy Lenton provides evidence that evolution is more dependent on the interaction among species than it is on the interaction of individuals within a species. Evolution becomes a matter of the survival of the fittest groups rather than the survival of the fittest individuals. In a 1998 article in Nature, Lenton wrote that rather than focusing on individuals and their role in evolution "we must consider the totality of organisms and their material environment to fully understand which traits come to persist and dominate." (Lenton ~ Bruce H. Lipton

The techno-medical model of maternity care, unlike the midwifery model, is comparatively new on the world scene, having existed for barely two centuries. This male-derived framework for care is a product of the industrial revolution. As anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has described in detail, underlying the technocratic mode of care of our own time is an assumption that the human body is a machine and that the female body in particular is a machine full of shortcomings and defects. Pregnancy and labor are seen as illnesses, which, in order not to be harmful to mother or baby, must be treated with drugs and medical equipment. Within the techno-medical model of birth, some medical intervention is considered necessary for every birth, and birth is safe only in retrospect. ~ Ina May Gaskin

Rules or no rules, pitchers are going to throw spitters. It's a matter of survival. ~ Bob Gibson

I feel like these characters, these places, these beings and plots, and even these inanimate objects are counting on me for survival. It's my responsibility to reveal them to the world, to show my readers the names of these things, to show them their histories and stories. ~ Nicholas Trandahl

In cocoon mode you are tapping into deep Mariana Trench energy and the Universe is helping make your destiny a reality. Whenever you make a conscious and positive effort to improve yourself and feed into achieving what you deserve from life you will emerge from the cocoon and become the butterfly. ~ Dan Born

If a man is a man and not a sheep in the flock, he has a survival instinct in him that leads him to fight even if he realizes he's fighting in vain, even if he knows he will lose.. ~ Oriana Fallaci

Scars speak for you. They say you're strong, and you've survived something that might have killed others. ~ Gena Showalter

The will to survive is not as important as the will to prevail ... the answer to criminal aggression is retaliation. ~ Jeff Cooper

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

A very interesting scene appears in the Bible right after the ten plagues. The Egyptians had enslaved the Jews and mistreated them, then they were punished severely, having their economy devastated and life as they had known it taken away from them by the effects of the ten plagues. But as the Jews were about to leave Egypt, the Egyptians gave the Jews all of their jewelry. Remember, these were people who had just lost their first born children. This was an amazing gesture of blessing from the ones who had cursed you. It would have been very easy for the Egyptians to have fallen into the "victim mode". Instead it was much more empowering for the Egyptians to take this as an experience never to be repeated. ~ Celso Cukierkorn

Keep your Firewall on: Another tactic of preventing yourself from getting hacked is to keep your computer Firewall on. You may put it on automated mode, so that whenever you turn on your PC, it automatically gets on. Stop trusting wares sites: Most of the malwares born and grows in the dig of the wares sites. So stop trusting such sites. Do not go for any of the bid mentioned on such sites. Avoid the offers offered on such sites. Don't run the exe programs: The used programs often contain malwares and so on. So, stop using the programs ~ The Hacking Boy

Our memory is enhanced by the emotion attending the event. The more intense the feelings the more accessible to the memory is the event. Few of us live lives so emotionally charged that we can truly, accurately retrieve all of it ... Often only our crisis events are preserved with strong emotions. For our own survival we can't forget them, and then we too easily forget the good stuff. ~ Robert Dykstra

The fear of death is presumably a survival instinct, Tin Win later thought. It must be an essential part of us, of every living creature. At the same time, we must transcend it to take our leave in peace. He found this an irresolvable contradiction. ~ Jan-Philipp Sendker

Our country also hungers for leadership to ensure the long-term survival of our Social Security system. With 70 million baby boomers in this country on the verge of retirement, we need to take action to shore up the system. ~ Kay Bailey Hutchison

We are survivors from the moment of diagnosis. ~ Peter Jennings

It's just something I'll have to live with... The possibility of getting sick. Not knowing if I'll live another two years or forty years. I keep telling myself, I could walk outside and get hit by a bus. That's the way life is. Just surviving another day comes with its own risk. ~ Tess Gerritsen