“Humans are probably the only creatures who know that they will die. They know for certain and yet they keep going. A resilient spirit and a need to survive does not make for cowardice.Salma to Merrick in Simple Conversation”

“Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.”

“Lessons: Diversity = resilience. Abundance = resilience. to survive catastrophe, you need a surplus, a reservoir, money under the mattress, food in the fridge. If you're already starving, you won't survive a famine. Take the world down to the bone and the only thing that flourishes are boneyards; the only thing that expands is collapse.”

“Be Disloyal. It's your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it's the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork. If you have to earn a living...and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent--and never let either of the two sides know your real name.”

“All that human energy, wasted, in response to the simple fact that we know we are going to die, and we don't know what happens after, and we're afraid that this life is all there is.”

“My only certainty in life is that I shall one day die. I can be certain of nothing else in the future. But either we survive (and so far in human history a vast majority has always survived) and having survived when we might not have done so gives us what we call happiness; or we do not survive and do not know it.”