Quotes About Adaptation

Take what is offered, and that must sometimes be enough.

about the blood; it isn't yours. You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you'll be taking it off again soon if you can manage not to get killed first. Don't worry about wounds; check your functionality.

Wardani had donned the emotional equivalent of a vacuum suit, the only response left in the human armoury when the moral parameters of the outside environment have grown so outrageously variable that an exposed mind can no longer survive unshielded.

It'll take a stronger kind of human to deal with it, but that's always been the case, with every major step in knowledge or technology that we take. You can't get by on past models, you have to keep moving forward, building better minds and bodies. Either that or the universe moves in like a swamp panther and eats you alive.

La culture est comme le smog. Pour y vivre, il faut en respirer une partie et, inévitablement, être contaminé.

Basically, she argues that the Secession was an example of a nation-state going extinct because it failed to adapt. America couldn't cope with modernity, it died from the shock and was torn apart by more adaptive entities. Though I think she tends to skate around the edge of what America really died of." "Which is what?" Yavuz shrugged. "Fear.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock. JAMES BALDWIN

I think that I need to learn a few different modalities of change: gradual and grounded like a seed growing and, too, when it is time to leap lest I be left hanging over a chasm clutching frantically to either side. In other words, I may need to listen to guidance about when to edge forward and when to leap forward. What clearly does not serve me is trying to meet every situation with an obdurate set mode.

Change is not made without inconvenience.   RICHARD HOOKER

I would far prefer to have things happen as they naturally do, such as the mousse refusing to leave the mold, the potatoes sticking to the skillet, the apple charlotte slowly collapsing. One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot.

Well, all I know is this—nothing you ever learn is really wasted, and will sometime be used.

After we'd moved into 81, we had placed an order for a phone, and waited. First a man came by to see if we lived where we said we did. Then two men visited to make a study of our situation. Then another man appeared to find out if we really wanted a phone. The process was very French, and made me laugh, especially when I thought of how quickly such a transaction would have taken place in the States.

Of course, our servings had assumed that one was making at least a three-course meal à la française. But that wasn't the American style of eating, so we had to compromise.

But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves.

Everybody, will you please just sit for a minute? Like children in a game of musical chairs, Tommy's three guests immediately reach for the nearest chair, pull it out from the table, and sit---even her brother. Well, says Tommy. Something in my life goes according to plan.

If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

Quantas vezes contamos a história da nossa vida? Quantas vezes adaptamos, embelezamos, fazemos cortes matreiros? E, quanto mais a vida avança, menos são os que à nossa volta desafiam o nosso relato, para nos lembrar que a nossa vida não é a nossa vida, é só a história que contámos sobre a nossa vida. Que contámos aos outros mas — principalmente — a nós próprios.

Blame someone else, that's always your first instinct. And if you can't blame someone else, then start claiming the problem isn't a problem anyway. Rewrite the rules, shift the goalposts.

The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.

And you can never prepare for this new reality in which you have been dunked.

Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.

Still, as I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the same way.

The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.