Sole Survivor Quotes

I had just heard tales that the Valkyrie were large warriors, akin to Amazons.” “If you’re the sole survivor of an army attacked by us, are you going to say we had our asses handed to us by petite, nubile females, or by she-monsters who can bench Buicks?

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

Human beings, however, were different from apples and oranges: The flavor of the peel did not reliably predict the taste of the pulp.

Cosby, 60. Weinstein, 87. Nassar, 169. The news used phrases like avalanche of accusations, tsunami of stories, sea change. The metaphors were correct in that they were catastrophic, devastating. But it was wrong to compare them to natural disasters, for they were not natural at all, solely man-made. Call it a tsunami, but do not lose sight of the fact that each life is a single drop, how many drops it took to make a single wave. The loss is incomprehensible, staggering, maddening—we should have caught it when it was no more than a drip. Instead society is flooded with survivors coming forward, dozens for every man, just so that one day, in his old age, he might feel a taste of what it was like for them all along.

Taking in money, banks were like industrial vacuum cleaners. Giving it out, they were clogged faucets

I was the last, the sole survivor. The most honorable thing a survivor could do was survive. If you stayed on your feet, stayed alive, you were the winner.

There's a humpback whale in the ocean that sings at fifty-two hertz: too low for any other whale to hear. Scientists aren't sure if it's a genetic anomaly, or a sole survivor of an extinct species, or just a whale who accidentally learnt the wrong song. They just know that it's probably the loneliest mammal on earth.

I can see clearly now, my brain is gone. Lucy

The truth was in her voice as sure as rain and sunshine are in a green blade of grass.

Let's just day love isn't easy. even when you're the sole survivors of a plane crash and you have the hots for each other.

Iden was, as far as she knew, the sole survivor out of over a million victims of this act of rebel terrorism.

Eleanor Oliphant, sole survivor—that’s me.

Grandpa Teddy often said, “In the beginning was the word. Before all else, the word. So we speak as if words matter, because they do.

For the first time, he considered that utter indifference might inspire not inner peace but a limitless capacity for evil.

final girl (n.)—the last and sole survivor of a horror movie

He had tried to shed his pain, to rise from the ashes like a drab phoenix with no hope except the cold peace of indifference. Now that events forced him to open himself to the world again, he was swamped by emotion as a novice surfer was overwhelmed by each cresting wave.

Years of therapy helped me see that the burden of blame lies solely on him. There was something wrong with him. Not me. Never me. And the most important lesson I learned is that I’m not a victim—I’m a survivor

Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.

This was Greater Los Angeles in an age of change, crackling with the energy of doom, yearning for the Apocalypse, where an unintended slight or an inadvertent trespass on someone else’s turf might result in a thermonuclear response.

anger harms no one more than he who harbors it. That both bitterness and true happiness are choices that we make, not conditions that fall upon us from the hands of fate. That peace is to be found in the acceptance of things that we are unable to change. That friends and family are the blood of life, and that the purpose of existence is caring, commitment.

An Encounter with the Man-Eating Savages of Ahwoo-Ahwoo, as Told by the Cabin Boy and Sole Survivor of a Gruesomely Failed Seafaring Expedition Through Parts Unknown: Absolutely Not to Be Read by Children Under Any Circumstances, and That Means You,

Archy was tired of Nat, and he was tired of Gwen and of her pregnancy with all the unsuspected depths of his insufficiency that it threatened to reveal. He was tired of Brokeland, and of black people, and of white people, and of all their schemes and grudges, their frontings, hustles and corruptions. Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.

When you feel that you aren’t like everyone else or feel tainted by what has happened to you, it’s hard to be optimistic about the future. In fact, for many survivors, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the future at all. Many of us are caught in a state where we’re still just trying to survive (our sole focus during trauma) and can’t think much beyond that. Time for us is frozen and the future feels hazy at best.

I have always taken great pride in managing my life alone. I’m a sole survivor—I’m Eleanor Oliphant. I don’t need anyone else—there’s no big hole in my life, no missing part of my own particular puzzle. I am a self-contained entity. That’s what I’ve always told myself, at any rate.

Los Angeles was the most glamorous, tackiest, most elegant, seediest, most clever, dumbest, most beautiful, ugliest, forward-looking, retro-thinking, altruistic, self-absorbed, deal-savvy, politically ignorant, artistic-minded, criminal-loving, meaning-obsessed, money-grubbing, laid-back, frantic city on the planet. And any two slices of it, as different as Bel Air and Watts, were nevertheless uncannily alike in essence: rich with the same crazy hungers, hopes, and despairs.

You know what I hate most about you, Marion? You're consistently, eternally wrong… and yet you're still alive. All those lost battles, every year of that entire lost war, but somehow you always cobble together enough dumb luck to walk away unscathed. The eternal sole survivor. You don't deserve that kind of luck. Nobody does.

By the next afternoon, a shepherd boy had heard his shouts and he’d been hauled up the cliffs and confined to an empty pigeon house, the sole survivor of his doomed mission. Gone cracked, though, from the ordeal. Ranting in perfect English about dragons and a young woman who could fly. No one believed him. A few people swore the airships had suffered lightning strikes, although the night had seemed so clear. A few more vowed they’d spotted them off the bluffs and fired at them, and that had brought them down. Whatever it had been, everyone seemed certain of two things. It had not been a dragon, and it had not been the poor, tormented Duke of Idylling.

The roots of the slasher movie stretch back to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), based on Robert Bloch’s book of the same name. While Bloch stated many times that his book was based on the real-life crimes of Ed Gein, far more clippings were found in his files regarding Wisconsin’s infamous children’s entertainer and serial poisoner, Floyd Scriltch. When Hitchcock purchased the rights to Bloch’s book, he also optioned the life rights from the sole survivor of Scriltch’s infamous “Easter Bunny Massacre,” Amanda Cohen. Cohen was instrumental in the detection and capture of Scriltch and paid a heavy price for her bravery. This book is dedicated to her memory.

The Turn of the Screw.

At two-thirty Saturday morning, in Los Angeles, Joe Carpenter woke, clutching a pillow to his chest, calling his lost wife’s name in the darkness.

I reckon he’s jealous, because he can see you have more talent than he’s got in his little finger.

Most movies are stupidity machines—like politicians.

Only the forces of ignorance and darkness benefit from secrecy.

If we live forever, it doesn’t matter so much what happens to us here.

Taking in money, banks were like industrial vacuum cleaners. Giving it out, they were clogged faucets. Heather

Only the human spirit can act with volition and consciously change itself; it is the only thing in all creation that is not entirely at the mercy of forces outside itself, and it is, therefore, the most powerful and valuable form of energy in the universe. For a time, the spirit may become flesh, but when that phase of its existence is at an end, it will be transformed into a disembodied spirit once more.

The sea delivered the message that life was nothing more than meaningless mechanics and cold tidal forces, a bleak message of hopelessness that was tranquilizing precisely because it was brutally humbling.

The sole reason I stand to open it up now is that lots of people who are in pain just like I was, and when they see that there is still hope, they will discover that it is possible to come out of their prison.

Once, when cornered by a pinwheel-eyed man who insisted that the mayor of Los Angeles was not human but a robot controlled by the audioanimatronics department at Disneyland, Joe had lowered his voice and said, with nervous sincerity, “Yes, we’ve known about that for years. But if we print a word of it, the people at Disney will kill us all.” He had spoken with such conviction that the nutball had exploded backward and fled.

Even when acceptance is achieved and a degree of happiness attained, joy often remains elusive forever, like a promise of water in a dry well once brimming but now holding only the deep, damp smell of past sustenance. Yet

If the universe was a cold mechanism, if life was a journey from one empty blackness to another, he could not rant at God, because to do so was no more effective than screaming for help in the vacuum of deep space where sound could not travel, or like trying to draw breath underwater.

Watching television news of freeway wrecks, apartment-building fires, and heinous murders, one sat numb and unaffected. Music that had once stirred the heart, art that had once touched the soul, now had no effect. Some people overcame this loss of sensitivity in a year or two, others in five years or ten, but others – never. The

Every night, millions of Americans spend their free hours watching television rather than engaging in any form of social interaction. What are they watching? In recent years we have seen reality television become the most popular form of television programming. To discover the nature of our current “reality,” we might consider examples such as Survivor, the series that helped spawn the reality TV revolution. Every week tens of millions of viewers watched as a group of ordinary people stranded in some isolated place struggled to meet various challenges and endure harsh conditions. Ah, one might think, here we will see people working cooperatively, like our ancient ancestors, working cooperatively in order to “win”! But the “reality” was very different. The conditions of the game were arranged so that, yes, they had to work cooperatively, but the alliances by nature were only temporary and conditional, as the contestants plotted and schemed against one another to win the game and walk off with the Grand Prize: a million dollars! The objective was to banish contestants one by one from the deserted island through a group vote, eliminating every other contestant until only a lone individual remained—the “sole survivor.” The end game was the ultimate American fantasy in our Age of Individualism: to be left completely alone, sitting on a mountain of cash! 　　While Survivor was an overt example of our individualistic orientation, it certainly was not unique in its glorification of rugged individualists on American television. Even commercial breaks provide equally compelling examples, with advertisers such as Burger King, proclaiming, HAVE IT YOUR WAY! The message? America, the land where not only every man and every woman is an individual but also where every hamburger is an individual! 　　Human beings do not live in a vacuum; we live in a society. Thus it is important to look at the values promoted and celebrated in a given society and measure what effect this conditioning has on our sense of independence or of interdependence

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children's hands, in front-yard plots—now standing by wallsides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests;—the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died—blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful lilac colors.

I have always taken great pride in managing my life alone. I’m a sole survivor—I’m Eleanor Oliphant. I don’t need anyone else—there’s no big hole in my life, no missing part of my own particular puzzle. I am a selfcontained entity. That’s what I’ve always told myself, at any rate. But last night, I’d found the love of my life. When I saw him walk onstage, I just knew. He was wearing a very stylish hat, but that wasn’t what drew me in. No —I’m not that shallow. He was wearing a three-piece suit, with the bottom button of his waistcoat unfastened. A true gentleman leaves the bottom button unfastened, Mummy always said—it was one of the signs to look out for, signifying as it did a sophisticate, an elegant man of the appropriate class and social standing. His handsome face, his voice . . . here, at long last, was a man who could be described with some degree of certainty as “husband material.” Mummy was going to be thrilled

He believed that he must learn to accept the cold mechanics of Creation, because it made no sense to rail at a mindless machine. After all, a clock could not be held responsible for the too-swift passage of time. A loom could not be blamed for weaving the cloth that later was sewn into an executioner’s hood. He hoped that if he came to terms with the mechanistic indifference of the universe, with the meaningless nature of life and death, he would find peace. Such

Age's sole purpose is to gift us more years in which to experience the minefield that is living. Along with that, it grants us the perspective to know that by the end of it all, it doesn't matter a damn whit that we no longer look like our younger selves. Because here's the thing we are no longer those supple, youthful, foolish people. We're that much older and infinitely wiser, war-weary and battle-scarred. We've become survivors and warriors, and as Ruby will tell you, you should always, always look the part.

I remembered all those times when the people around me believed that I had spent the last two years of my life faking an eating disorder for the sole purpose of attention. For that reason, every day I would read a thousand articles and watch a hundred videos on real survivors who’d battled anorexia. Then I would question myself. My ribs aren’t popping out of my stomach, so maybe it’s actually just in my mind. Then after a few days of surviving on nothing at all, I would look at myself, see my ribs popping out and ask myself, Am I now?

In March 2015, sixteen accused policemen were acquitted of their involvement in the Hashimpura massacre, making minorities even more cynical about the promises of justice from secular parties. The case dated back to 1987 when riots had erupted in Meerut. Men from UP’s Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) dragged out young Muslim men, most of them poor daily wagers and weavers, drove them to the Upper Ganga Canal in Ghaziabad instead of to the police station, and threw them in one by one. V. N. Rai, who was superintendent of police in Ghaziabad, wrote a chilling account of how the police—who described Meerut as a ‘mini Pakistan’ and held the Muslims solely responsible for the violence—had behaved. ‘Every survivor who hit the ground after being shot at tried hard to pretend he is dead and most hanged on the canal’s embankments with their heads in water and the body clutched by weeds to show to their killers that they were dead and no more gunshots fired at them. Even after the PAC personnel had left, they lay still between water, blood and slush. They were too scared and numbed even to help those who were still alive or half dead.

I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that observes me observing it. I’m like a playing card belonging to an old and unrecognizable suit – the sole survivor of a lost deck. I have no meaning, I don’t know my worth, there’s nothing I can compare myself with to discover what I am, and to make such a discovery would be of no use to anyone. And so, describing myself in image after image – not without truth, but with lies mixed in – I end up more in the images than in me, stating myself until I no longer exist, writing with my soul for ink, useful for nothing except writing. But the reaction ceases, and again I resign myself. I go back to whom I am, even if it’s nothing. And a hint of tears that weren’t cried makes my stiff eyes burn; a hint of anguish that wasn’t felt gets caught in my dry throat. But I don’t even know what I would have cried over, if I’d cried, nor why it is that I didn’t cry over it. The fiction follows me, like my shadow. And what I want is to sleep.

I have always taken great pride in managing my life alone. I’m a sole survivor—I’m Eleanor Oliphant. I don’t need anyone else—there’s no big hole in my life, no missing part of my own particular puzzle. I am a selfcontained entity. That’s what I’ve always told myself, at any rate. But last night, I’d found the love of my life. When I saw him walk onstage, I just knew. He was wearing a very stylish hat, but that wasn’t what drew me in. No —I’m not that shallow. He was wearing a three-piece suit, with the bottom button of his waistcoat unfastened. A true gentleman leaves the bottom button unfastened, Mummy always said—it was one of the signs to look out for, signifying as it did a sophisticate, an elegant man of the appropriate class and social standing. His handsome face, his voice . . . here, at long last, was a man who could be described with some degree of certainty as “husband material.

Because both Birkenau and Auschwitz are infamous names and a blot on the history of mankind it is necessary to explain how they differed. The railroad separated one from the other. When the selectors told off the deportees on the station platform “Right!” or “Left!” they were sending them to either Birkenau or Auschwitz. Auschwitz was a slave camp. Hard as life was at Auschwitz it was better than Birkenau. For the latter was definitely an extermination camp, and as such was never mentioned in the reports. It was part of the colossal guilt of the German rulers and was rarely referred to, nor was its existence ever admitted until the troops of the liberating Allies exposed the secret to the world. At Auschwitz many war factories were in operation, such as the D.A.W. (Deutsches-Aufrustungswerk), Siemens, and Krupp. All were devoted to the production of armaments. The prisoners detailed to work there were highly privileged compared to those who were not given such employment. But even those who did not work productively were more fortunate than the prisoners in Birkenau. The latter were merely awaiting their turn to be gassed and cremated. The unpleasant job of handling the soon-to-be corpses, and later the ashes, were relegated to groups called “kommandos.” The sole task of the Birkenau personnel was to camouflage the real reason for the camp: extermination. When the internees in Auschwitz, or in other camps in the area, were no longer judged useful they were dispatched to Birkenau to die in the ovens. It was as simple and cold-blooded as that.

He is a middle-class man trying to get by in an oligarchic world. Thirty years ago, Mantel’s Cromwell would have been of limited interest. His virtues—hard work, self-discipline, domestic respectability, a talent for office politics, the steady accumulation of money, a valuing of stability above all else—would have been dismissed as mere bourgeois orthodoxies. If they were not so boring they would have been contemptible. They were, in a damning word, safe. But they’re not safe anymore. They don’t assure security. As the world becomes more oligarchic, middle-class virtues become more precarious. This is the drama of Mantel’s Cromwell—he is the perfect bourgeois in a world where being perfectly bourgeois doesn’t buy you freedom from the knowledge that everything you have can be whipped away from you at any moment. The terror that grips us is rooted not in Cromwell’s weakness but in his extraordinary strength. He is a perfect paragon of meritocracy for our age. He is a survivor of an abusive childhood, a teenage tearaway made good, a self-made man solely reliant on his own talents and entrepreneurial energies. He could be the hero of a sentimental American story of the follow-your-dreams genre. Except for the twist—meritocracy goes only so far. Even Cromwell cannot control his own destiny, cannot escape the power of entrenched privilege. And if he, with his almost superhuman abilities, can’t do so, what chance do the rest of us have? This terror

I immediately packed up Bindi and went to catch the next plane home. The family was in free fall. Steve was in shock, and Bob was even worse off. Lyn had always acted as the matriarch, the one who kept everything together. She was such a strong figure, a leader. Her death didn’t seem real. I sat on that plane and looked down at Bindi. Life is changed forever now, I thought. As we arrived home, I didn’t know what to expect. I had never dealt with grief like this before. Lyn was only in her fifties, and it seemed cruel to have her life cut short, as she was on the brink of a dream she had held in her heart forever. These were going to be her golden years. She and Bob could embark on the life they had worked so hard to achieve. They would be together, near their family, where they could take care of the land and enjoy the wildlife they loved. I couldn’t imagine what Steve, his dad, and his sisters were going through. My heart was broken. Bindi’s gran was gone just when they had most looked forward to spending time together. The aftermath of Lyn’s death was every bit as awful as I could have imagined. Steve was absolutely inconsolable, and Bob was very obviously unable to cope. Joy and Mandy were trying to keep things together, but they were distraught and heartbroken. Everyone at the zoo was somber. I felt I needed to do something, yet I felt helpless, sad, and lost. Steve’s younger sister Mandy performed the mournful task of sifting through the smashed items from the truck. One of the objects Lyn had packed was Bob’s teapot. There was nothing Bob enjoyed more than a cup of tea. As Mandy went to wash out the teapot, she noticed movement. Inside was Sharon, the bird-eating spider, the sole survivor of the accident. Although her tank had been smashed to bits, she had managed to crawl into the teapot to hide. After the funeral, time appeared to slow down and then stop entirely. Steve talked about moving out to Ironback Station. He couldn’t seem to order his thoughts. He no longer saw a reason for going on with all the projects on which we had worked so hard. Bindi was upset but didn’t have the understanding to know why. She was too young to get her head around what had happened. She simply cried when she saw her daddy crying. It would be a long time before life returned to anything like normalcy. Lyn’s death was something that Steve would never truly overcome. His connection with his mum, like that of so many mothers and sons, was unusually close. Lyn Irwin was a pioneer in wildlife rehabilitation work. She had given her son a great legacy, and eventually that gift would win out over death. But in the wake of her accident, all we could see was loss. Steve headed out into the bush alone, with just Sui and his swag. He reverted to his youth, to his solitary formative years. But grief trailed him. My heart broke for my husband. I was not sure he would ever find his way back.

Hanna Krall’s book Shielding the Flame drew on the experience of Dr. Marek Edelman, who before he died in 2009 was the sole survivor of the five-person command that led the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

By the very nature of accelerating progress, the world’s first naturally evolved high technology–wielding species could very possibly be its last. Beyond that, self-directed evolution trumps the processes of naturally occurring evolution, potentially leaving machine intelligence as the sole survivor.

EFFORTS HAD BEEN MADE BY Coruscanti who cared about such things to preserve some of the structures the B’ankora had built and lived in for more than fifty generations. In the rush to relocate the species’ sole survivors and complete the construction of the Celestial Power facility, the request to create a museum had been denied. Regardless, some of the B’ankora’s original paths remained, winding through gardened parcels, around landscaped areas, and past totemic sculptures and geometric assemblies of wood and stone. Since he rarely ventured outdoors, the paths were new to Galen, and he followed them without really taking notice, his feet and legs merely carrying him along. Neither was he aware of the day’s heat, the slight breeze tousling his long unkempt hair, the tiers of horizontal traffic above him, the faint roar of the city-planet. Ten thousand beings might have been observing him from the surrounding monads and arcologies, but he gave them no thought. He moved somnambulantly.

My bed was calling me, so I turned off my mobile, switched on the answering machine and climbed under the duvet for a few hours of divine uninterrupted sleep.

Liberians must stay away from "CHARITY" donations from the WEST, and EMPOWER THEMSELVES. Charity gives but doesn't transform. We can only "CHANGE" our country by empowering our people. By no other means, but through "EDUCATION." Education turns a man/woman from beggars to sole-survivors.

Until the industrial revolution, most wealth was held in land. Primogeniture was a powerful tool for aristocrats aiming to avoid fractionation among heirs, the outcome inflicted on Black and Native American owners—and on the Irish. Fractionation was in part responsible for the Irish Potato Famine and the resulting wave of immigration to the United States. Following the Popery Act of 1703, England did not allow primogeniture for Catholics in Ireland, so their farms fractured as generations passed. Plots shrank to the point that planting a diversified range of crops became impossible. Eventually, potatoes were the only viable, nutrient-dense food that could be farmed. When a blight killed that sole crop, there was no alternative. A million Irish people starved to death; an exodus of survivors came to America.

A man whose whole family died under torture, and who had himself been tortured for a long time in a concentration camp. Or a 16th century Indian, the sole survivor after the total extermination of his people. Such men if they had previously believed in God would either believe it no more, or else they would conceive of it quite differently than before.

His mouth twitches again, so close to smiling that I realize he’s jesting. “Your family and I didn’t get along.” “They’re your family too.” He laughs hollowly. “Is that what you call a father who beats you senseless and a mother who closes her bedroom door and pretends not to hear it? Family?” I almost drop my fork. “What?” He looks up at me, a thin crease appearing between his eyebrows. “Did he never—” He breaks off suddenly, shaking his head. “You know what? Doesn’t matter.” He ruffles his hair again with a laugh that rings like a marble in a jar. “Nice to know there’s a part of our family legacy that will always be solely mine.

REWIND OR DIE Midnight Exhibit Vol. 1 Infested - Carol Gore Benny Rose: The Cannibal King - Hailey Piper - Jan. 23 Cirque Berserk - Jessica Guess - Feb. 20 Hairspray and Switchblades - V. Castro - Feb. 20 Sole Survivor - Zachary Ashford - Mar. 26 Food Fright - Nico Bell - Mar. 26 Hell’s Bells - Lisa Quigley - May 28 The Kelping - Jan Stinchcomb - May 28 Trampled Crown - Kirby Kellogg - Jun. 25 Dead and Breakfast - Gary Buller - Jun. 25 Blood Lake Monster - Renee Miller - Jul. 23 The Catcatcher - Kevin Lewis - Jul. 23 All You Need is Love and a Strong Electric Current - Mackenzie Kiera - Aug. 27 Tales From the Meat Wagon - Eddie Generous - Aug. 27 Hooker - M. Lopes da Silva - Oct. 29 Offstage Offerings - Priya Sridhar - Oct. 29 Dead Eyes - EV Knight - Nov. 26 Dancing on the Edge of a Blade - Todd Rigney - Dec. 12 Midnight Exhibit Vol. 2 - Dec. 12

The sole remaining chestnut goes on flowering. But its blooms have no more blooms to answer them. No mates exist for countless miles around, and a chestnut, though both male and female, will not serve itself. Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There’s work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same. Or as the nurse to the Union dead writes: Stand cool and composed before a million universes. As cool and composed as wood.

In one respect the world seemed to have suffered material loss by the visitation of the deluge. Along with the agents and instruments of evil there had also been swept away by it the emblems of grace and hope—paradise with its tree of life and its cherubim of glory. We can conceive Noah and his household, when they first left the ark, looking around with melancholy feelings on the position they now occupied, not only as being the sole survivors of a numerous offspring, but also as being themselves bereft of the sacred memorials which bore evidence of a happy past, and exhibited the pledge of a yet happier future. An important link of communion with Heaven, it might well have seemed, was broken by the change thus brought through the deluge on the world" (P. Fairbairn).

now

Word was, her power was old and ancient and derived from the lives of her sister witches lost in the Salem trials. Alice was the sole survivor, thanks to Elenora’s intervention.

After the five Sullivan brothers were lost in November 1942, a long-standing misconception developed among the general public that the Navy absolutely forbid brothers from serving together and went to lengths to reassign them to other ships. This was never the case. Rather, a Bureau of Naval Personnel circular two full years after the Sullivan tragedy addressed the “Return to the United States of Sons of War-Depleted Families,” essentially a sole survivor policy. This recognized “the sacrifice and contribution made by a family which has lost two or more sons who were members of the armed forces and has only one surviving, and he is serving in the Navy, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard.” In that case, consideration would be given “to his return to, or retention in, the continental limits of the United States, except when he is engaged in nonhazardous duties overseas.” None of this was automatic, however, and applications for such return or retention to duty within the United States had to be filed by the sailor himself or his immediate family. Out of a sense of service, many men never took advantage of these provisions in the final year of the war.

Koontz is the author of seventy-nine New York Times bestsellers, fourteen of which rose to #1, including One Door Away from Heaven, From the Corner of His Eye, Midnight, Cold Fire, The Bad Place, Hideaway, Dragon Tears, Intensity, Sole Survivor, The Husband, Odd Hours, Relentless, What the Night Knows, and 77 Shadow Street.

Pekes and the Pollicles” was the sole survivor of his original scheme. Eliot’s letter to Geoffrey Faber suggested another building block, an event that brought the cats together. “The Song of the Jellicles” is about a Jellicle Ball. Could this have been the event that Eliot was proposing? If so “Practical Cats” would have dance at its centre. Dance was now sweeping Britain, albeit about six decades behind America. Brian Brolly reluctantly accepted that Cameron would co-produce with the Really Useful Company. “Practical Cats,” the musical, was born.

I know it wasn't my fault. I know I didn't ask for it or do something to invite it. It didn't steal my ability to trust people or cause me to fear every man that crosses my path. Years of therapy helped me see that the burden of blame lies solely on him. There was something wrong with him, Not me. Never me. And the most important lesson I learned is that I'm not a victim-- I'm a survivor

My mother personally knew Nusreta Sivac, who was held, tortured, and raped at the camp for two months. I admire Nusreta’s extraordinary courage and fortitude in enduring the horror of genocide and speaking boldly about her experiences. She is a champion for women’s rights and a hero of the Bosnian people. She motivated and vehemently advocated for justice by persuading other Bosniak rape victims to come forward and take legal action against their perpetrators. Thanks to Nusreta’s efforts, rape in the context of war is categorized as a war crime under international law. She was instrumental in helping convict her rapist and bringing him to justice. She was continually raped for two months in captivity. Sivac also spent years collecting evidence and testimonies from rape survivors and constructing legal cases which were presented to the ICTY. For centuries, rape was considered a byproduct of war. Are women just considered spoils of war? Her contributions are a powerful achievement because they mark the first time in history that an international court convicted war crimes solely for sexual violence. I applaud Nusreta for being a pioneer.

You have to read the Bible like it’s a love letter from God to you. Pore over every word and search for the meaning of every sentence—every nuance.

We are sole hominin survivors, but not the inevitable masters. Luck, as much as biology, might have been key to sapiens’ place in the world. Our existence as a species is due to a series of devastating, largely random catastrophes, each of which overhauled the planet and its ecosystems, providing new opportunities: from the meteorite impact that killed the dinosaurs but unleashed mammals through to climate change in Africa some 2 million years ago and the emergence of the great savannahs.

To those who encountered Otto at the time, he seems to be a man purged by fire, walking through Amsterdam as though in a strange dream, searching for news of his children. Finding out that he was his family's sole survivor must have sent him to a very dark place. Vince hypothesized that Otto's grief had eventually turned into a mission to find the people responsible for the Annex raid, although his motive was not vengeance; he was seeking accountability and justice.

In February 1982, Uli Hoeness was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed three of his best friends. ‘That day, the sunny boy in me died,’ Hoeness later said, but people who know him well claim it was rather the egotist in him that died. Under his guidance, Bayern slowly and often secretly would now also become what the writer Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling has called a ‘welfare organisation’. No German club played more benefits and did more to raise money for those in need than Bayern. And when Markus Babbel left the club for Liverpool under less than amicable circumstances in 2000, he always let it be known he would never speak badly of Hoeness. ‘Among the top clubs in Europe, Bayern are the most humane,’ Babbel said. ‘They have always shown generosity when there were problems. Take Alan McInally, who became an invalid and didn’t have any insurance. The club said: we’ll give you severance pay. They practically gifted him the money. Our business manager is somebody you can talk to about such things.

tries, and tries very hard, but she doesn’t know what it’s like to be the sole survivor, the only one left of one’s contemporaries. They’ve all gone now. They’re all dead and buried. My dearest friends, my loved ones. Even my enemies are no longer around to get my goat and spark the will in me to fight.

have been straight away shot. So we had to have a very, very positive attitude.’ I was running out of energy. All the effort of getting the piece of cotton

Mercenary armies were abolished in the new Swiss federal constitution of 1848, although existing contracts were still honoured (how very correct) until the government banned all forms of fighting for money in 1859. The sole survivor of the bloody practice is the Pope’s Swiss Guard, which has been protecting his Holiness since 1506. To serve in Rome, the men must be under 30, over 1.74m tall, single and have completed their Swiss military service. Being both Swiss and Catholic are somewhat essential as well.

Stan has decided to kill off all the crew of Discovery and leave Bowman only. Drastic, but it seems right. After all, Odysseus was the sole survivor.

And now the reader will ask what became of the three penguins' eggs for which three human lives had been risked three hundred times a day, and three human frames strained to the utmost extremity of human endurance. Let us leave the Antarctic for a moment and conceive ourselves in the year 1913 in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I had written to say that I would bring the eggs at this time. Present, myself, C.-G., the sole survivor of the three, with First or Doorstep Custodian of the Sacred Eggs. I did not take a verbatim report of his welcome; but the spirit of it may be dramatized as follows: First Custodian. Who are you? What do you want? This ain't an egg-shop. What call have you to come meddling with our eggs? Do you want me to put the police on to you? Is it the crocodile's egg you're after? I don't know nothing about 'no eggs. You'd best speak to Mr. Brown: it's him that varnishes the eggs. I resort to Mr. Brown, who ushers me into the presence of the Chief Custodian, a man of scientific aspect, with two manners: one, affably courteous, for a Person of Importance (I guess a Naturalist Rothschild at least) with whom he is conversing, and the other, extraordinarily offensive even for an official man of science, for myself. I announce myself with becoming modesty as the bearer of the penguins' eggs, and proffer them. The Chief Custodian takes them into custody without a word of thanks, and turns to the Person of Importance to discuss them. I wait. The temperature of my blood rises. The conversation proceeds for what seems to me a considerable period. Suddenly the Chief Custodian notices my presence and seems to resent it. Chief Custodian. You needn't wait. Heroic Explorer. I should like to have a receipt for the eggs, if you please. Chief Custodian. It is not necessary: it is all right. You needn't wait. Heroic Explorer. I should like to have a receipt. But by this time the Chief Custodian's attention is again devoted wholly to the Person of Importance. Feeling that to persist in overhearing their conversation would be an indelicacy, the Heroic Explorer politely leaves the room, and establishes himself on a chair in a gloomy passage outside, where he wiles away the time by rehearsing in his imagination how he will tell off the Chief Custodian when the Person of Importance retires. But this the Person of Importance shows no sign of doing, and the Explorer's thoughts and intentions become darker and darker. As the day wears on, minor officials, passing to and from the Presence, look at him doubtfully and ask his business. The reply is always the same, "I am waiting for a receipt for some penguins' eggs." At last it becomes clear from the Explorer's expression that what he is really waiting for is not to take a receipt but to commit murder. Presumably this is reported to the destined victim: at all events the receipt finally comes; and the Explorer goes his way with it, feeling that he has behaved like a perfect gentleman, but so very dissatisfied with that vapid consolation that for hours he continues his imaginary rehearsals of what he would have liked to have done to that Custodian (mostly with his boots) by way of teaching him manners.