Quotes About Adaptation

But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort of another. And it was fine to plan an emotional strategy, but another thing when the ground opened up in front of you, and your defending troops toppled into a ravine which hadn't been marked on the map until a few seconds previously.

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.

Time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent.

There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication?

I was also gone in a sense that I was transformed, made over. You know that story of the man who wakes up and finds he's turned into a beetle? I was the beetle who woke up and saw the possibility of being a man.

Let others argue about that; his only concern was to get to the end of each day. He had become a technique for survival. Below a certain point, that was what all men became: techniques for survival.

Now he could run an office—wherever, whenever—like any grooved old hacker. He kept his satisfactions to himself. And over the years he had also learned to see the point of money: what it could—and couldn't—do. There was another thing. It was a job below his qualifications. Not that he didn't take it seriously; he did. But since, professionally, he had now lowered his expectations, he found that he was rarely disappointed.

Alice was surprised. In her worldview, everything was hopeless, but you just had to get on with it. And there wasn't much point changing what you believed at this late stage of the game.

But then we learn something else: that the brain doesm't like to be typecast. Just when you think everything is a matter of decrease, of subtraction and division, your brain, your memory, may surprise you. As it it's saying: Don't imagine you can rely on some comforting process of gradual decline--life's much more complicated than that. And so the brain will throw you scraps from time to time, even disengage those familiar memory loops.

Language too is a brake upon social change.

Now I feel like we weren't made for each other. We're making each other -- into the people we should become.

suddenly remembered that when I portrayed Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on Broadway, I unconsciously toed-in, giving the flower girl a slightly pigeon-toed lack of grace in her clumsy boots, then I straightened my feet when she acquired confidence and poise as a "lady." It made me smile to think I was doing the exact opposite for Mary Poppins.

She didn't usually mind being just a bit in over her head. She generally flailed like a becalmed ship, irritable and purposeless and panicked, when things were simple.

Even cliffs are vulnerable, Captain Eversea, she thought. The sea gets at them, eventually, reshaping them inexorably, giving them no choice at all in the matter.

Oh, God. She'd now have to invent a bawdy verse on the spot. She'd never had to improvise so much in her entire life as she had in the last five minutes. Improvise being another word for lie, of course.

but the pain was old to him, and somehow it had become a part of him. He could bear it and speak of it. It had shaped him; he had accomodated it. He had loved abd he had lost and it had made him who he was.

Delilah had been transferred from her father's household to her husband's like crated porcelain.

What I know is you can't go back. You can't press delete and re-key your life.

Going for it and changing what you could change-that's what success was all about.

Anger and hate are destructive emotions and neither will change the facts.

Soon we could barely recognize them. They were taller than we were, and heavier. They were loud beyond belief. I feel like a duck that's hatched goose's eggs.

He always felt like he had lived his life in between spaces, at the crossroads of cultures. Between cultures, places, and people. Africa, America, France. He took them all for himself, for they all belonged to him, blending them to create a new self, one that he believed could represent the future

You cannot change what you cannot make sense of.

Look forward, not back, the Hag said. All is change. Do not regret. Instead, learn.