Quotes About Adaptation

I decided to call him Ford Prefect. (This was a joke that missed American audiences entirely, of course, since they had never heard of the rather oddly named little car, and many thought it was a typing error for Perfect.) I explained in the text that the minimal research my alien character had done before arriving on this planet had led him to think that this name would be "nicely inconspicuous." He had simply mistaken the dominant life form.

The history of every major galactic civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Enquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. 'For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat?, the second by the question Why do we eat?, and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?

I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,' he muttered to himself.

Who said anything about panicking?' snapped Arthur. 'This is still just the culture shock. You wait till I've settled down into the situation and found my bearings. Then I'll start panicking!

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places its prepared to put up with living.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me.

If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you? It'll still be happening to an unchanged person.

Remember how, back in 1990, if you used a cellphone in public you looked like a total asshole? We're all assholes now.

you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.

The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species.

You're right, a spleen is a strange thing-we technically don't need one, but maybe spleens are kept in our bodies in case we mutate or evolve, and if we grow wings or tentacles we need to have the spleen in place in order for them to work.

For there was once a time when we expected the worst. But then the worst happened, did it not? And so we will never be surprised ever again.

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

Douglas Coupland

If nothing else, we simply get used to being alive.

As far as I can see, Janet, life is just an endless banquet of loss, and each time a new loss is doled out, you have to move your mental furniture around, throw things out, and by then there's more loss, and the cycle goes on and on. (All Families are Psychotic.)

Neal fished around in a bag, removed something and handed it to me. It was a forky thing, but with a round depression. "What the fuck is this?" "It's a spork.

I am by now completely convinced that my downfall in life is going to be my inability to achieve computer nirvana like a true hacker or hackette. I think this lacking is the most unmodern facet of my personality—the career equivalent of having six fingers, or a vestigial tail.

Once you've used your brain flat-out, you can't go into the SLOW mode. You can't drive an Infinite J-3B and then get downgraded to an Daewoo. Brains don't workd that way.

we started talking more about all of the fiftysomethings being dumped out of the economy by downsizing. No one knows what to do with these people, and it's so sad, because being 50 nowadays isn't like being 50 a hundred years ago when you'd probably be dead.

You could return to that same hive a thousand years later and there would be just the same perception of tomorrow as never being any different. Humans are completely different. We assume tomorrow is another world.

Nostalgia for the 20th century brain helps nobody.

Most every new man who came into the neighborhood had to be tried.