Quotes About Adaptation

Adaptamos nuestra vida a las circunstancias y cogemos la felicidad donde la encontramos, aun cuando sólo sea en momentos pasajeros. O hacemos eso o nos perdemos la oportunidad de aceptar la gracia en nuestra vida. Este es un momento feliz. Lo recordaré.

A veces es necesario volver atrás para poder seguir avanzando

This is your home, but it is mine no longer. I have to find my own place.

When you travel, there really are no mistakes--just learning opportunities.

If your opinions and commitments appear to change from year to year or decade to decade, what are the more abstract underlying convictions that have held steady, that might never have become visible without the surface variation?

Moving is both liberating and debilitating. Undertaken too late, it is a very stressful process, one that sometimes seems to catapult people into frail old age, and undertaken too soon, it may preempt other possibilities. [p. 38]

We never promised we would stay the same,/But only we would shape our change/From this now single clay. [p. 82]

Sorting gets harder as time goes on--it requires a sort of ruthless decisiveness, while indecision results in endless dithering. Five moves, they say, equal a fire. But those who haven't moved may begin to need a fire. [p. 38]

Engineers don't go to confession when they screw up; they find a fix.

like people were all runny and liquid, running over this surface and that, looking for a container to hold everything in place, trying one thing, then the next, incessantly looking for the right one. Except the containers were only big enough for one personality trat at a time; you had to grab on to one trait, bring it out for a while, then put it back and pull out another one. For a while, we were loving; then we were alienated and angry, then ironic, then depressed.

Nou ja, je weet zelf hoe het is. Je hebt me vaak genoeg vijf verschillende japonnen op een dag zien dragen. Denk je dat je dat aankunt als we getrouwd zijn?' 'Ik zal met genoegen toekijken hoe je je vijf keer per dag omkleedt,' zei Luciano.

And that point is, it doesn't matter how long you've known somebody. People change. Or you don't really know them as well as you thought you did in the first place.

Some things are unchangeably wild, others are stolidly tame. The tiger is wild, and the coyote, and the owl. I am tame, you are tame. There are wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change. But the dog lives in both worlds.

Congratulations, if you have changed.

If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves. If you are in the sea I will slide into that smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt. But if you are sad, I will not dress myself in desolation. I will present myself with all the laughters I can muster. And if you are angry I will come, calm and steady, with some small and easy story.

Who can guess the impatience of stone to be ground down, to be a part of something livelier?

Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules

But listen now to what happened to the actual trees; toward the end of that summer they pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs. It was the wrong season, yes, but they couldn't stop. They looked like telephone poles and didn't care. And after the leaves came blossoms. For some things there are no wrong seasons. Which is what I dream of for me.

It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone.

Nature there will always be, but it will not be what we have now, much less the deeper fields and woodlands many of us remember from our childhood. The worlds of van Gogh and Turner and Winslow Homer, and Wordsworth too, and Frost and Jeffers and Whitman, are gone, and will not return. We can come to our senses yet, and rescue the world, but we will never return it to anything like its original form.

Sloths don't move a lot, but when they need to escape from a predator, they can actually be pretty fast. They are also good swimmers.

Science has the answer to every question that can be asked. However, science reserves the right to change that answer should additional data become available.

On top of its other charms, the maggot breathes through its ass. It

Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fish they've caught for their young. Penguins' hunting grounds may be several days' journey from the nest. Without this handy refrigerated mode, the swallowed fish would be completely digested by the time the adults get back—"like