logo

Quotes About Adaptation

doing many more things until it seemed that ritual had replaced grief.
~ V.S. Naipaul
If you get too attached to your roots in the old sense, you might actually become unrooted, fossilized. At least in form, at least in style, you must get into the new stream, get the new roots. More of India is doing that. Style becomes substance in one generation. Things that one starts to do because other people are doing it – like wearing long pants, in my father's case – become natural for the next generation.
~ V.S. Naipaul
We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed.
~ V.S. Naipaul
Without always knowing what we were doing we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we were surrounded.
~ V.S. Naipaul
We heard of ambushes on roads we knew, of villages attacked, of headmen and officials killed. It was at this time that Mahesh said something which I remembered. It wasn't the kind of thing I was expecting from him - so careful of his looks and clothes, so spoiled, so obsessed with his lovely wife. Mahesh said to me: What do you do? You live here, and you ask that? You do what we all do. You carry on.
~ V.S. Naipaul
It seemed as easy as that, if you came late to the world and found ready-made those things that other countries and peoples had taken so long to arrive at – writing, printing, universities, books, knowledge.
~ V.S. Naipaul
No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.
~ V.S. Naipaul
Because they could assess themselves, the Europeans were better equipped to cope with changes than we were.
~ V.S. Naipaul
Confronted with her, I shed old fantasies. My body obeyed its new impulses, discovered in itself resources that answered my new need.
~ V.S. Naipaul
It was what he had taught her, what she had picked up from him and incorporated, as words, as passing attitude, into the chaos of words and attitudes she possessed: words that she might shed at any time as easily as she had picked them up, and forget she had ever spoken them, she who had once been married to a young politician and had without effort incarnated an ordinary correctness, and who might easily return to such a role.
~ V.S. Naipaul
We take the staples of modern life so much for granted until we're deprived of them. People do live quite well without what we consider to be basics, but they manage because they've never been de-skilled by their presence. To lose them when you've lived all your life with power at the touch of a switch and water at the turn of a tap is shocking, then unsettling, then grindingly depressing.
~ Val McDermid
But I do sometimes wonder whether the technology has de-skilled us as detectives.
~ Val McDermid
If only this mist would clear, it would be a lovely day, she said faintly. And if only the clouds would thicken up it would be a miserable day, Mr. Allen contributed from behind the paper. It is what it is.
~ Val McDermid
people are shaped by what happens to them and how they respond to it.
~ Val McDermid
Tony took a deep breath and deliberately relaxed his body. He used breathing techniques to put himself into a light state of trance. He instructed his conscious mind to let go, to allow his higher self to access directly all he knew about Handy Andy and to answer for him. When he spoke, even his voice was different. The timbre was rougher, the tones deeper. 'I blended in. I took care. I watched and I learned.
~ Val McDermid
Neanderthals
~ Val McDermid
Women get into a relationship hoping a man will change, and he never does; men get into a relationship hoping the woman don't change, but she always does. Men want their partners to be consistent. That they won't make impromptu impossible demands nor baffle him with classically female sudden-onset hysterical behavior.
~ Valerie Frankel
Strivers are driven to test themselves over and over again. They don't rest on their accomplishments. Success urges them to reach higher, take bigger risks. If they fail, they pull themselves back up. Ambition is the essence of human evolution. Strivers adapt to their changing environment.
~ Valerie Frankel
The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip in to it; as for the red bloody meat, the steaming innards - they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution - and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked it's gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different.
~ Vasily Grossman
È stupefacente come quelle bestie riutilizzassero ogni cosa - cuoio, carta, stoffa, tutto ciò che era servito agli esseri umani serviva, tornava utile anche alle bestie. Solo la cosa più preziosa al mondo - la vita - veniva calpestata.
~ Vasily Grossman
We have learned much during our long lives. Yet there we were in our old age, thinking that we had done our share in life. So we stopped, just like that. No more working like we used to, even though our bodies are still healthy enough to do a little more than we expect of ourselves.
~ Velma Wallis
SWT Instead For senior leaders, we propose replacing the SWOT with the SWT: an updated approach that identifies inherent Strengths and Weaknesses within their firms while exploring broader external Trends beyond their own industry or geography.
~ Verne Harnish
Jeff Bezos asks his team each week is what competitors have entered their market in the last seven days!
~ Verne Harnish
As a winding river must follow the contours of the landscape on its way to the ocean, a business must navigate the undulations of the marketplace on the way to its Everest.
~ Verne Harnish