Quotes about Survival

The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.

Few, if any, survive their teens.

Never let white folks know what you really think. If you're sad, laugh. If you're bleeding inside, dance.

The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can't. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot.

Thus we lived through a major war. The questions in the ghettos was, can we make it through a minor peace?

People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all.

For centuries we had probed their faces, the angles of their bodies, the sounds of their voices and even their odors. Often our survival had depended upon the accurate reading of a white man's chuckle or the disdainful wave of a white woman's hand. Whites, on the other hand, always knew that no serious penalty threatened them if they misunderstood blacks. Whites were safely isolated from our concerns.

It's how we survive the hurts in life that brings us strength and gives us our beauty.

Oysters are a lot like women. It's how we survive the hurts in life that brings us strength and gives us our beauty.

Perhaps the most profound miracle of all is living through something we thought would kill us.

My wish for you, Kallistos, is that you survive as many battles in the flesh as you have already fought in your imagination. Perhaps then you will acquire the humility of a man and bear yourself no longer as the demigod you presume yourself to be.