Quotes About Adaptation

We never shape the world . . . the world shapes us.

So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know.

Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on.

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. —Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory

Other people went crazy, why couldn't she? Other people's brains stopped, turned around and went on to something new...

The unending problem of growing old was not how he changed, but how things did.

These westbound pioneers slogged through the morass on foot, or in wagons drawn by mules and oxen. Impossible for them to conceive that their mud march would one day become sport for modern Americans

We can't condone what the Spanish did; it seems barbaric to us," Larry said. "But I admire their tenacity, giving up everything familiar to come here. It would have been like traveling to the moon today." Tim agreed. "Unless you reenact Mother Teresa, you're going to run into problems if you judge people by today's moral standards.

Look at these buttons," one soldier said, fingering his gray wool jacket. "I soaked them overnight in a saucer filled with urine." Chemicals in the urine oxidized the brass, giving it the patina of buttons from the 1860s. "My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air and said, 'Tim, you've been peeing on your buttons again.

dialectics, as a veteran communist explained . . . 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet.

Those who got the twentieth century right, whether in anticipation [..] or as contemporary observations, had to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent.

The past was neither as good nor as bad as we suppose: it was just different. If we tell ourselves nostalgic stories, we shall never engage the problems that face us in the present - and the same is true if we fondly suppose that our own world is better in every way. The past really is another country: we cannot go back. However, there is something worse that idealising the past - or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.

Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of

The most obvious symptom of the change came in the form of 'planning'.

If you do what you have always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.

I found that life has to be edited to continue.

All of life is change. When we learn to stop fighting it, that's when we can start to be happy.

California is where you get to start over.

It's simple, Miss Philpot. This is one of God's early models, and He decided to give the subsequent ones smaller eyes." I raised my eyebrows. "Do you mean God rejected it?" "I mean God wanted a better version—the crocodile we know now—and replaced it.

Cuvier has suggested that animal species sometimes die out when they are no longer suited to survive in the world. The idea is troubling to people because it suggests that God does not have a hand in it, that He created animals and then sat back and let them die.

I could have panicked. Before the journey I might have. But something had shifted in me while I spent all that time on deck watching the horizon: I was responsible for myself. I was Elizabeth Philpot , and I collected fossil fish.

Men can live without air a few minutes, without water for about two weeks, without food for about two months — and without a new thought for years on end.

Even if we painstakingly piece together something lost, it doesn't mean things will ever go back to how they were Berserk

She has this curious heavy grace, like something out of its element making do in a heavier medium. Like she should be living in water.