Survivor S Guilt Quotes

“She hurries out of the hammering rain into the puddled shelter of St Pancras. As arranged, he's waiting outside WH Smith, and her heart jerks like a bad dog on a lead.”
― Lesley Glaister, A Particular Man

“She likes his wide, easy smile, the texture of his skin, the thick fair hair on his arms, almost like fur, the wholesome soapy smell of him. And she likes his height. He's taller by far than any British man she's been with; it's excessive, unnecessary, gorgeous. Invisibly, she sighs. Of course, she always knew it was temporary: that's the deal with G.I.'s.”
― Lesley Glaister, A Particular Man

“But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.”
― Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter

“The Death Eaters were waiting for us,” Harry told her. “We were surrounded the moment we took off — they knew it was tonight — I don’t know what happened to anyone else, four of them chased us, it was all we could do to get away, and then Voldemort caught up with us —”
He could hear the self-justifying note in his voice, the plea for her to understand why he did not know what had happened to her sons, but —
“Thank goodness you’re all right,” she said, pulling him into a hug he did not feel he deserved.
“Haven’t go’ any brandy, have yeh, Molly?” asked Hagrid a little shakily. “Fer medicinal purposes?”
She could have summoned it by magic, but as she hurried back toward the crooked house, Harry knew that she wanted to hide her face.”
― J.K. Rowling

“This guilt was an invisible but heavy albatross hanging around my neck. (That’s a reference to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.) I wear that bird like Björk wore her swan dress. I wave from a red carpet leading to hell.”
― Myriam Gurba, Mean

“Still, I insisted that I was as entitled to a Survivor's Syndrome as my father, so she asked me two questions. The first one was this: "Do you believe sometimes that you are a good person in a world where almost all of the other good people are dead?"
"No," I said.
"Do you sometimes believe that you must be wicked, since all the good people are dead, and that the only way to clear your name is to be dead, too?"
"No," I said.
"You may be entitled to the Survivor's Syndrome, but you didn't get it," she said. "Would you like to try for tuberculosis instead?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“It's a singular sort of pain, watching the most beautiful creature self-destruct because you weren't able to find the red wire.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“The closest my generation will ever come to the spirit of the original Woodstock was September 12th, 2001. For a few weeks, we believed that we were integral members of the brotherhood of Man. It didn't matter who our neighbors were (aside from a few isolated cases of the paranoia-induced beatings of Sikh children). We wanted to make sure they were holding up so that we could feel that they wanted to know the same about us. We needed a national tragedy beyond our reckoning to shake us loose from the mundane, a trip far more heinous than anything the infamous brown acid would have given us. Woodstock existed for people on the brink of seeing what life meant. September 12th was in acknowledgment for how that life could end, and the almost guilty thrill that we made it through.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Holidays with Bigfoot

“The Master Plan by Stewart Stafford

Do you choose to lose yourself
In grief’s planetoid hinterlands,
Discarding every gift given
By loved ones in preparation?
Wade through marsh and swamp,
The world turns for mogul and meagre.

Burdened down by survivor's guilt,
Unspoken words, unfinished deeds,
A wandering, teetering flagellant,
Haunted by what should have been.
You were and are loved, not begrudged,
Olympic torch bravery delighting others.

Familiar hands on marathon's shore,
Offer self-medicating cocktails,
To numb the Captain to his storm,
Resist to avoid addiction's reefs,
Resolve to endure whatever comes.

We are driftwood, seedpods,
Blind to windswept grand design.
And the most important decision,
Who to pass trust's baton to?
We must not believe our eyes,
As all we see is weaponised.

Human instinct,
A mighty shield unseen,
Guiding us through,
Where we dare not lean.
The path of fearlessness,
A paradox in itself;
A source of fear,
Inside a shipyard of hope.

In dreamlike audacity,
grasp destiny with barriers lifted,
clothed in courage’s cloak.
Grieve,
Emerge transformed,
Octopus ink to glowing algae,
Knowing others will come,
To complete our healing.

Our plotted course continues,
Until privy to the master plan,
At last, upon the inverse shore,
As loved ones congratulate.

© 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Cid Arthur found more than poverty when he escaped his father's palace. He found sickness, too. As did I. The Gray Rot had been on Emesh for some years, brought by some unscrupulous trader from off world. The natives had no immunity, and the animalcule chewed through like paper and festered in the street. I was palatine. I was immune, Mother Earth have mercy on me.
Have you ever stopped to think about what it would be like to sit in the belly of an epidemic, untouched by it? I felt like a ghost. My body's almost-alien biochemistry--the legacy of tens of generations and of millions of Imperials marks worth of genetic recombination--preserved me from every weeping sore, every bout of necrosis, every bleeding cough. It sounds like a blessing. It is no blessing to watch other men die, even less to watch the ones you love waste away. When I started this account, I thought to skip this part, so painful was my loss of Cat. But I was wrong. She matters. She must matter.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“I bet Giyu wished that he'd died. I understand so well it hurts. When someone dies, someone who is so important that you wish they'd lived instead of you, and they died protecting you... It feels like you're being ripped apart. - Tanjiro”
― Koyoharu Gotouge, 鬼滅の刃 15 [Kimetsu no Yaiba 15]