Quotes About Adaptation

He is more rooted to the idea of home. He created this home...and established routines like watching the BBC and cooking barbecues for friends. It's much harder to dismantle that world and to rebuild it somewhere else.

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody's in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson's and Chapters.

things will never stay the same.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

make away out of no way

I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.

What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise.

The road we have taken to this point has not been easy. But then again the road to change never is.

Isn't that what you say in America? Just go with the flow.…" Roy laughed again, loud enough for the people at the next table to turn around. Only the magic was gone out of it now; it sounded hollow, as if it were traveling across a vast, empty distance.

Hope and change were a luxury, folks seemed to be telling us, exotic imports that would wilt in the heat.

I realized that justifying the past mattered less than planning what to do next.

in a climate of constant technological change.

justifying the past mattered less than planning what to do next.

Looking back, I realize I was doing what most of us tend to do when we're uncertain or floundering: We reach for what feels familiar, what we think we're good at.

History travels not only forwards; history can travel backwards, history can travel sideways.

I reminded myself that every president felt saddled with the previous administration's choices and mistakes, that 90 percent of the job was navigating inherited problems and unanticipated crises. Only if you did that well enough, with discipline and purpose, did you get a real shot at shaping the future.

My anger when a young Kerry staffer informed us that I had to cut one of my favorite lines because the nominee intended to poach it for his own speech.

I didn't seem threatened, as they were, by the idea that the rest of the world was catching up to us.

I'm not cut out for happy. Busy is going to have to do.

Sometimes it just is what it is, Wade. There are things we can change and things we can't. The key is knowing the difference.

Inadvertently, I had stumbled across what has been called the Harvard law of animal behavior, which is related to Murphy's law: You can have the most beautifully designed experiment with the most carefully controlled variables, and the animal will do what it damn well pleases.

During your career with Wal-Mart, you may be cross-trained in other departments in your facility. This will challenge you in new areas, and help you be a well-rounded Associate" ("Wal-Mart Associate Handbook," p. 18).

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

Everyone, from software writer to accountant, was now subject to the same insecurities as the "lonely salesman" once targeted by Norman Vincent Peale.