Survival Mode Quotes

In my early days, I was about 145 pounds. I was really a starving artist; the poster child for starving artists.

Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That's not possible on $1 a day.

I was living on a loaf of bread a week.

In fiction you're not often writing about the typical; you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour... another part comes from my personality: I'm an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody.

When your back is against the wall, your brain has to function at a high level.

Without any formal orders to retreat, what was left of the several organizations yielded to a general impulse to abandon the field. Officers and men became controlled by the one thought of getting as far as possible from the enemy.

It was a real hand-to-mouth existence in those early days - I'd have whatever dry cereal there was in the house for breakfast, 30 cents to spend on lunch and a hot dog for dinner. I did that for years. So there was definitely a hunger in me, of various kinds, to succeed.

Egypt was tough without our parents. My brothers and sisters had to work day by day, and every time they collected a pay cheque, they brought it into the house and put it on the table. That's how we lived.

The '$O$' phase, it was like, 'Save Our Souls': we didn't know how we were going to get out of our situation... It was our last chance just to go all out. 'Ten$ion' was another phase, to maintain the tension we had, just to pretend nothing had happened and stay in that same furious, hungry zone.

I think most human beings, even if you're in a situation that's constricting or complicated or hard, they try to survive.

We can't be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.

I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn't know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.

I grew up poor. I never had any money. I was a hobo, you know, ride the freights.

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

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.

When they face desperation... human beings become animals.

Where I grew up, there were times when we didn't have anything to eat.

There was a period of time during the 'Jagged Little Pill' era where I don't think I laughed for about two years. It was a survival mode, you know. It was an intense, constant, chronic over-stimulation and invasion of energetic and physical literal space.

I grew up poor in India, and there were days when we struggled to find food and other basic necessities. Our mother worked odds and ends jobs to keep the family together and educate us.

When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.

Rabbits live close to death and when death comes closer than usual, thinking about survival leaves little room for anything else.

I'm interested in how we react when we're heavily pressed. When we're vulnerable and our survival is in question, how do we behave?

Sometimes, you just feel like you're just surviving for parts of the season.

I'm still living the life where you get home and open the fridge and there's half a pot of yogurt and a half a can of flat Coca-Cola.

There were about two years when I literally paid no rent anywhere in the world. Everyone's a contact, but there's no real human interaction. That's a very wearying thing.