Quotes About Adaptation

Matt discovered that no matter how terrified he'd been at first, it wasn't possible to stay terrified. It was as though his brain said, Okay. That's enough. Let's find something else to do.

You get used to being evil.

The brain is shaped by the experiences of the body, and the body is shaped by the brain. Changing one part results in lethal confusion for the other.

The secret of successful education is finding out how a particular person learns.

Fortresses may or may not be useful according to the times; if they do good in one way, they do harm in another.

Han aprendido a ser lo que no son y lo que son. (de El Sueño ds la Razón Produce Monstruos)

The one certainty in life is that it changes.

Life on the road, even for a worldly man like C. W. Post and his well-bred daughter, presented certain challenges. although he could order meals, fasten Marjorie's buttons, and make sure that she was properly dressed, C. W. could not fix her hair.

It reminds me that something can be broken and then get tossed around a lot and what comes out at the end is amazing.

Don't ever wish the past was different than it is. It's always what brought you here. And here is where you are.

I'm not saying I'm glad it happened. Not exactly. But I'm not sorry to be the person I am today, and to have the life I have now. Even though it's not what I thought I wanted for my future, a year ago, it is what I want now. ...

We do not always respond to shocks with regression. Sometimes, in the face of crisis, we grow up—fast.

Nonetheless, that order has now been destabilized, which means that the rest of us are going to have to quickly figure out how to turn "managed degrowth" into something that looks a lot less like the Great Depression and a lot more like what some innovative economic thinkers have taken to calling "The Great Transition."56

Countries, like people, don't reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep on breaking.

Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all.

And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it's that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming.

To [Heartland president Joseph Bast], it looks like the end of the world. It's not, of course. But it is, for all intents and purposes, the end of his world.

the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.

We need to remember that the work of our time is bigger than climate change. We need to be setting our sights higher and deeper. What we're really talking about, if we're honest with ourselves, is transforming everything about the way we live on this planet.

We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.

Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us."28

is the new stability.

But none of that matters at all." His head raised to stare balefully at me, but I said, incoherent yet convinced, "It's just—a way to go. There isn't only one way to go." I waved at his notes. "You're trying to find a road where there isn't one. It's like—it's gleaning in the woods," I said abruptly. "You have to pick your way through the thickets and the trees, and it's different every time.

me. The tea was even offered exactly in the same way that Americans always did it, namely with the faint hint that they didn't really understand why I might like some tea, but they understood that this was the appropriate thing to do.