Christopher Columbus Quotes

In really bad times, the hungriest would gather at his door at nightfall, vying for the chance to earn a few coins to feed their families by selling their bodies. Had I been older when my father died, I might have been among them. Instead I learned to hunt.

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

The master says it's a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there's anyone in the world who would like us to live. My brothers are dead and my sister is dead and I wonder if they died for Ireland or for the Faith. Dad says they were too young to die for anything. Mam says it was disease and starvation and him never having a job. Dad says, Och, Angela, puts on his cap, and goes for a long walk.

He'll die first, we both know it, but I don't know... I really don't know how long I'll stay alive without him. That's the part Shaun doesn't know. I don't intend to be an only child for long.

How many would die did not hope sustain them.

My dad was dead, so these streets had to raise me.

At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.

We packed up all the worldly possessions we could carry with us and took the next flight to Hawaii from Washington. It took just about every cent my family had to our name just to pay the plane fare. When we arrived, we had about $15 left among us. We were really in pitiful shape. But we were together, and we were alive, and this was all that mattered.

Granana doesn't understand what the big deal is. She didn't cry at Olivia's funeral, and I doubt she even remembers Olivia's name. Granana lost, like, ninety-two million kids in childbirth. All of her brothers died in the war. She survived the Depression by stealing radish bulbs from her neighbors' garden, and fishing the elms for pigeons. Dad likes to remind us of this in a grave voice, as if it explained her jaundiced pitilessness: "Boys. Your grandmother ate pigeons."

Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them.

My father died when I was 10; my sister got polio a couple of years later and was paralyzed. So there I was - my sister in a wheel chair, my father gone, and my mother a quiet little mouse. You see, it was the '30s in the South, so my mother was not prepared to cope. So I was scared to death. And being that scared, everything afterward became a struggle not to go down the drain. Struggling became a way of life for me.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman's Woe!

Where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.

I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe that's what being a parent is supposed to feel like.

She gave me this look – she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around.

In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth.

The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? — Because one did survive the wreck.

The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.

Loss is loss. Doesn't take death to create it.

The only question now is: How much can I hang on to?

The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of thecompass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer.

There was no sun; there was no light. I was dying. I couldn't remember what the sky looked like. But I didn't die. I was lost to a sea of cold, and then I was reborn into a world of warmth.

Sometimes holding on was all you could do.

What if what you do to survive kills the things you love?