Quotes About Adaptation

In December we move into the house. It's a half-ruin and only two rooms are habitable. It resembles the first place I lived when I arrived in this country. We don't have heat for the entire winter, and for a month we have to bathe from a bucket. Casa de Campo, I call the place in jest, but he doesn't take kindly to any criticism of his "niño." Not everyone can own a home, he reminds me. I saved eight years for this.

Se suponía que al crecer uno perdiera la capacidad de dormir con facilidad en lugares nuevos, pero yo nunca la tuve como para perderla.

She thought she'd hate it, this huge, faceless city far from home, but the opposite was true: she felt nothing but relief. The heedless sprawl of Denver, its chaotic snarl of subdivisions and freeways; the openness of the high plains and the indifferent mountains; the way people talked to each other, easily, without pretense, and the fact that nearly everyone was from somewhere else: exiles, like her.

It was true what Michael said about him: his blindness wasn't something missing; it was simply something different.

as the years had passed

A lot of life, Michael had learned, came down to trying to fix things that weren't fixable.

Any system that is not self-sustaining tends to oppose natural flow; and failure to auto-correct leads to self-destruction to give rise to a new system(s) to restore the balance.

No experience is wasted.

As expansive as the view was, my hometown had shrunk without anything changing but my perspective.

You raze the old to raise the new.

No power was total, no power permanent, no power absolute.

Progress is hard on history.

Expect the best, but prepare for the worst.' I'm good at the first part, crap at the second.

I can critique the bad; I can take the good, and I can add whatever I want.

Once you become fluent in a language or in a set of ideas, you immediately internalize them to the extent that other languages and ideas sound automatically strange and foreign.

How long before we devise a means of telling horoscopes with gas lamps?

It's the world! What can you do?

I mention this because that's how the world changes. It's either so quick that we never know what hit us, or so gradual that we don't notice.

The way I see it, the truth is just barren moorland, all useless bog and heather. It's only when you break it up and turn it over with the ploughshare of the Good Lie that you can screw a livelihood out of it. Isn't that what humans do? They take a dead landscape and reshape it into what they need, and want, and can use. I've never hesitated to adapt the world to suit me, when I can get away with it.

like a cartwheel over a hedgehog,

The way I see it, the truth is just barren moorland, all useless bog and heather. It's only when you break it up and turn it over with the ploughshare of the Good Lie that you can screw a livelihood out of it. Isn't that what humans do? They take a dead landscape and reshape it into what they need, and want, and can use.

master of alternatives, the eternal custodian of Plan B;

It was good to know that memory could be melted down and recast if it came out flawed the first time around, just like a bell.

For ten days, all I'd had to wash in was the piss-pot, and the nearest water was the pump, five flights of narrow, winding steps down, and loneliness had been the least of my problems, if you count tiny things that bite as company. I'm not the most fastidious of men, but I don't like it when I turn into the sort of creature I'd cross the street to avoid.