Quotes About Adaptation

John Kotter in Leading Change says that a primary reason why change does not occur is that there is no sense of urgency.

No matter where you are you can grow something to eat. Shift your thinking and you'd be surprised at the places your food can be grown! Window sill, fire escape and rooftop gardens have the same potential to provide impressive harvests as backyard gardens, greenhouses and community spaces.

Animals have two functions in today's society, to be delicious and to fit well.

How can we account for long-term memory", van Lommel asks, "if the molecular makeup of the cell membrane of neurons is completely renewed every two weeks and the millions of synapses in the brain undergo a process of constant adaptation?"15

A baby takes everything from you. Everything you were before." She waved a hand, a ghostly flicker in the blackness. "Your time. Your figure. Your looks. They take your sleep until you don't know how to function.

and harmony between partnerships and friends. And the key to harmony is to make room for change in your life. It's this

a professional project, relationship, or school assignment doesn't turn out the way that was expected, we can always learn from our experiences and do things differently the next time around.

Some of us are just better at nodding along to the music we're supposed to be hearing. From 'Or She Dies'.

I know how to handle stress better than that. Things have been good long enough that I forgot what it's like to be graceful when they're not.

From the inside, a violent home looks starkly different than it does to outsiders. Children who grow up with cold, narcissistic, or sadistic parents don't know that a caretaker with the potential for extreme cruelty is not the norm. Even when they see a contrast in the families of friends, they've already been robbed of the ability to challenge parental authority. Instead of seeking help, they hunker down and adapt.

There are no monotone "values" in biology.

No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.

We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future.

Once you've grown up in space, moving on means moving out, not going back to Earth. Nobody wants to be a groundpounder.

Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man's belt - big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change. The Sunborn

Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status.

There are no mistakes. Only new paths to explore.

Marxism-Leninism offered little guidance to rural Afghan society, with its ancient concepts and ways.

Not all engagement with our past is characterized by crisis.

Just as Bob Dylan's true audience may be those who came before him, those he's trying not to dishonor when he sings their songs or makes those songs into new ones, it may be his true biography is his inhabiting of other lives.

There are no do overs and some things just aren't going to happen. It is a little sad but you just have to embrace what is

The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

So much has broken away already, there is nothing to drink but air, nothing left to walk on but water, yet the fasting heart grows full.

If you're yearning for the good old days, just turn off the air conditioning.