David Sedaris Quotes

For us, it's a matter of just staying alive and getting the best deal we can now. Eventually, this will all straighten out. It may be two generations away or 10 generations away, but time is irrelevant in that sense. As long as we, as a people, stay alive, we will survive.

While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

Books are sharks... because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.

And there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clamped it in a carapace, diminished it to a pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can.

Winning is important, but survival is even more important. If you don't survive, you don't get to fight the next battle.

We are powerful because we have survived

Living things have been doing just that for a long, long time. Through every kind of disaster and setback and catastrophe. We are survivors.

The key to Zeppelin's longevity has been change.

A place like this wears down everything, and tolerance is no exception. In here, coexistence passes for forgiveness. You do not learn to like something you abhor; you come to live with it...You live and let live, and eventually that becomes enough.

As time goes on, you'll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn't, doesn't. Time solves most things. And what time can't solve, you have to solve yourself.

Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.

Time changes everything, but with patience we can keep our desires relatively constant. If we can just hang on long enough, time will eventually create for us the conditions in which we can succeed.

Surviving means being born over and over.

I'm here because they've killed almost all of us, but not all of us. And that's their mistake, son. That's the flaw in their plan. Because if you don't kill all of us at once, whoever's left are not going to be the weak ones. The strong ones- and only the strong ones- will survive. The bent but unbroken, if you know what I mean. People like me. And people like you.

I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.

Il faut d'abord durer (First One Must Endure).

Survival is the key word to remember—not victory, not conquest, just survival.

The rules of survival never change, whether you're in a desert or in an arena.

I guess if you stay around long enough, they can't get rid of you.

It's not how fast you get there, but how long you stay.

I think it surprises a lot of people that I'm still around, you know, still - that I'm not pushing up daisies, as they say.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

I want to be around a really long time. I want to be a thorn in the side of everything as long as possible.

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.

The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.