Quotes About Adaptation

Things in the margins, including humans who wander there, are often on the brink of becoming something else, or someone else.

It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.

But still, I'd be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation.

When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

The war's [World War II] end has left America with loads of get-up-and-go, and no place to go.

Every family's its own trip to China.

She is not a bulldog, only a woman pressed into the shape of a small jar, possibly attempting to dance in there. It shows in the way she places a seashell on a window sill, a red-painted chair in the corner: she is practiced in the art of creating a still life and taking up residence inside it.

That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he's forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it's called Monotony.

I felt emptied-out and singing with echoes, unrecognizable to myself: that particular feeling like your own house on the day you move out.

There's nothing like living as a refugee in one's own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist.

always tried to be positive with her, although I'd learned

In Congo, a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror's music and sang a new song of her own.

To live is to be marked, to live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.

You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back.

I knew it was only shadow and the angle of the sun, but still it's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

The pale-skinned boy stood shivering in water up to his waist, thinking these were the most awful words in any language: You will be surprised. The moment when everything is about to change.

It hit me pretty hard, how there's no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning.

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony. Well, I put up with him anyway.

First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.

In the scullery kitchens and probably the salt mines of this world, many a child is not so much raised as hammered into shape, Artie. To be of use. Surviving by the grace of utility alone.

The leopards will walk upright like men on our paths. The snakes will come out of the ground and seek our houses instead of hiding in their own.

This is darkest Africa, where life roars by you like a flood and you grab whatever looks like it will hold you up.