Quotes About Adaptation

To cling to the past is hypocrisy, because no one knows those moments.

How should those of us of no great education challenge him at table when he compared the efficiency of lions and camels and arrived at the conclusion that the carnivorous lion was far less efficient than the camel in the desert, which ate plants and grass.

When one cannot think of how to do things better one simply makes things bigger. The construction of the great pyramids in Egypt marked the end of the Old Kingdom. Bigger and bigger cathedrals and temples were built when the faithful became secure and comfortable. Dinosaurs, too, were an evolutionary dead end: the huge reptiles were replaced by small, energy-efficient mammals.

You have to deal with people the way they are, not the way you'd like them to be.

There is an obvious difference between someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside.

A goose instinctively heads south in a V-formation in a V formed of other geese instinctively heading south. It doesn't check out the beach and experiment with a sandpiper lifestyle. It does what it's designed to do.

The subject of food is like Chopsticks: almost anyone can improvise on it.

Who would think that water could grind a rock to sand, or wear away a cliff, unless they'd seen it with their own eyes? Never say never, little sister. Who can tell what the future will bring?

The art of hiding in plain sight used to be second nature, and now it has become the whole of him

I had been working there for several months [in New York], in that climate of intellectual openness which is so astonishing to an Australian...

coming to terms with the city" –

crossing the lines, which is probably as good a definition of how social change happens as one can find.2

If you pretend to feel a certain way, eventually you do feel that way.

Perhaps effort doesn't matter, it isn't what ensures survival.

If you pretend to feel a certain way, eventually you do feel that way. That has been a surprisingly pleasant lesson to learn in life.

If there's no apparent reason for something to change, then why does it change? Is it a dog's nature to vary behaviour when life becomes too comfortable? Is it ours?

We have built our houses between what is fluid and what is fixed.

A man can't make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree.

A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, [...]

You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

Watching, not doing. Seeking safety in not being seen. It's a habit you can fall into, willing yourself into invisibility. And it doesn't serve you well in life. Believe me it doesn't. Not with people and loves and hearts and homes and work. But for the first few days with a new hawk, making yourself disappear is the greatest skill in the world.

Mabel stops looking murderous and assumes an expression of severe truculence. How the hell, I imagine her thinking, am I supposed to catch things with this idiot in tow?

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.