Anna Quindlen Quotes

Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization.

With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of life.

Survival is important, art is secondary. If you aren't alive, how can you create art?

The blood is the life!

That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

He who would live must fight. He who doesn't wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.

Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

The whole existence of man is a ceaseless duel between the forces of life and death.

Life is the elimination of what is dead.

All life is a struggle.... Under competition the lazy man is put under the necessity of exerting himself; and if he will not exert himself, he must fall behind. If he do not work, neither shall he eat.

The main thing is not to be dead.

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

In the vast game of Darwinian musical chairs, whenever the music stopped there were large numbers of people without a seat—and some smartass had sold them guns.

The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

The breath that sharpens life is life itself.

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.

Our natures lie in motion, without which we die.

When you have life, you can weather any storm. You're breathing. You have life.

Maggie the cat is alive. I'm alive.

It isn't important to come out on top, what matters is to be the one who comes out alive.

At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can't take anything, you won't get anything, and if you can't hold anything, you won't keep anything. And you can't take anything without organization.

To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could.

Nature clasps all her creatures in a universal embrace; there is not one of them which she has not plainly furnished with all means necessary to the conservation of its being.