instinct

Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure, it's a little like making love, the physical act of love.

Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.

None of my mental activities for the past twenty-four hours might be called thinking. I had allowed my body to take charge. It knew far more about escaping and healing than I did.

Be careful who's advice you heed to! It is better to listen to your heart.

There was something about the story she told us...that didn't seem right to him. He didn't buy the idea they'd been lovers. He reckoned it was something else. It's the sort of thing he used to pick up on, when I worked with him. You know as well as I do, sir, in a case like this you collect all sorts of facts, but only a few really matter, and Mr Madden had a gift for spotting them. Not that he always knew why: often it was just something he felt - a sort of instinct, I suppose - though he would have said it was simply a matter of paying attention. That's what he used to tell me.

You know you love something if you're willing to die for it, and you know it means nothing if you walk away from that which is dying.

There seemed no answer. He wasn't resigned to anything, he hadn't accepted or adjusted to the life he'd been forced into. Yet here he was, eight months after the plague's last victim, nine since he's spoken to another human being, ten since Virginia had died. Here he was with no future and a virtually hopeless present. Still plodding on.Instinct? Or was he just stupid? Too unimaginative to destroy himself? Why hadn't he done it in the beginning when he was in the very depths? What had impelled him to enclose the house, install a freezer, a generator, an electric stove, a water tank, build a hothouse, a workbench, burn down the houses on each side of his, collect records and books and mountains of canned supplies, even - it was fantastic when you thought about it - even put a fancy mural on the wall?Was the life force something more than words, a tangible, mind-controlling potency? Was nature somehow, in him, maintaining its spark against its own encroachments?He closed his eyes. Why think, why reason? There was no answer. His continuance was an accident and an attendant bovinity. He was just too dumb to end it all, and that was about the size of it.

Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?

In their huge bedroom that night, Tyr said to Thor, "I hope you know what you are doing.""Of course I do," said Thor. But he didn't. He was just doing whatever he felt like doing. That was what Thor did best.

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form...The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct, Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

If the baser instinct of rampant self-preservation adamantly refuses to surrender itself to the infinitely greater call of self-sacrifice, in attempting to save our lives we will have in reality completely destroyed our lives.

Your life is a divine self.

So stretch! Reach for it. Like falling down stairs, where your inner-genius takes over and saves you _ your instincts are ready to serve you.

The true voice is a good spirit.

The spirit finds a way to be born. Instinct seeks for ways to survive.

O Lord point the right path for me to walk on it.