Quotes About Adaptation

I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

She stopped typing. If she'd been using pen and paper, she would have screwed the paper up in disgust, but there wasn't a satisfying equivalent with e-mail, seeing as everything was designed to stop you making a mistake. She needed a fuck-it key, something that made a satisfying ka-boom noise when you thumped it.

There was an awful lot to be said for familiarity, if you thought about it. It was an extremely underrated virtue, ignorable until the very moment that you were in danger of losing whatever or whoever it was that was familiar—a house, a view, a partner.

conversation was not something imposed from above, like an examination. It was more like a sofa that worked out the shape of your arse and adjusted accordingly

you had to do, it seemed, was ask for an inferior version of the life you'd had before and London would give it to you.

I'm OK. Really. I can find people. I'll be all right.

Environment is what you make it and destiny is how you react to your environment: whether you try to overcome it or just resign yourself to it.

All complex life shares an astonishing catalogue of elaborate traits, from sex to cell suicide to senescence, none of which is seen in a comparable form in bacteria.

Sex is far more widespread than seems reasonable.

Once the little squirt has found a suitable home, it attaches itself soundly to the spot and then, needing it no longer, reabsorbs its own brain (a feat that arouses much admiration among university professors, Steve Jones quips).

I hope to persuade you that energy is central to evolution, that we can only understand the properties of life if we bring energy into the equation.

The first true eyes appeared somewhat abruptly in the fossil record around 540 million

As a rule of thumb, the hermaphrodite lifestyle works well if the prospects of finding a mate are slim, for example in low-density or immobile populations (explaining why many plants are hermaphrodites), while separate sexes develop in species with higher population densities or greater mobility.

There were three things that could fundamentally change a person: time, alcohol, and managing a bureaucracy.

Licenció el antiguo ejército y creó uno nuevo; dejó las amistades viejas y se hizo de otras; y así, rodeado por soldados y amigos adictos, pudo construir sobre tales cimientos cuanto edificio quiso; y lo que tanto le había costado adquirir, poco le costó conservar.

No one but her uncle knew that under Fursey's tutelage she could make her letters or that she understood Latin if it was spoken slowly—and even he seemed content to let her learn privately. Until she knew how these newcomers thought and what they wanted, she would keep it that way, keep her dice rattling in her cup. It was foolish to throw before all bets were on the table.

Now that mine is almost over, I can say that the one thing that struck me most about life is the capacity for change. One day you're a person and the next day they tell you you're a dog. At first it's hard to bear, but after a while you learn not to look at it as a loss. There's even a moment when it becomes exhilarating to realize just how little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.

He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it.

I like to think the world wasn't ready for me, but maybe the truth is that I wasn't ready for the world. I've always arrived too late for my life.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him.

Childhood is a process of slowly recomposing oneself out of the borrowed materials of the world.

The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we might never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us--we couldn't use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.

A place belongs to anyone who has a use for it.