Quotes About Adaptation

Where's my Italian lace? Where's my bouffant sleeves? Where's my goddamn hoop skirt? The same place as your goddamned morals, you worthless tramp. It's been modernized, Brenda, Agnes said. When you pass something on to someone else, you have to expect changes. You don't get it back.

Oh," Jake said. "So, this is what you want?" "No," Kate said. "But this is what I've got.

Ultimately, we can never change someone else's behavior—we can only change our own.

Things happen, and you can't make them un-happen. You don't get do-overs, you can't roll back the clock, and the only thing you can change, and the only thing that does any good to worry about, is how you let them affect you.

instead of cash. It took me the better part of another week to register

This wasn't the life she signed up for.

Going with the flow is soothing but risky.

No wonder these people don't believe in evolution. It obviously hasn't worked in their favor.

Carrie, at forty-six, has had to learn that an entire set of previous behaviors are no longer acceptable. "I don't have the option of cutting myself, or overdosing, or being hospitalized anymore. I vowed I would live in and deal with the real world, but I'll tell you, it's a frightening place. I'm not sure yet whether I can do it or whether I want to do it.

who wants to be foretold the weather?  It is bad enough when it comes, without our having the misery of knowing about it beforehand. 

There might be a better land where bicycle saddles are made out of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard.

W]hen a man is much above the average size and strength, we cut one of his legs or arms off, so as to make things more equal; we lop him down a bit, as it were. Nature, you see, is somewhat behind the times; but we do what we can to put her straight.

But who wants to be foretold the weather?  It is bad enough when it comes, without our having the misery of knowing about it beforehand.

We're sort of like the town whore that's finally become an institution. We're finally becoming respectable.

Sometimes I want to go back to the old flip phone. One of those old-people ones that they advertise on TV with the giant buttons like floor tiles.

She's in tenth grade,' he said. 'I hear she's been homeschooled till now.' Maybe that explains it,' I said.

Cross the creek on the stepping stones of your failures.

The horizontal world I had thought I occupied was tilting, dumping me somewhere else, somewhere new.

Strange territory for me: the after-snap. I still feel myself vibrating. Humming.

He thinks they may also imitate the sounds of birds that are no longer around. He thinks the sounds of extinct birds are passed down the years from mockingbird to mockingbird... He says when a mockingbird sings, for all we know it's pitching fossils into the air. He says who knows what songs of ancient creatures we may be hearing out there.

I'm not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn, I outgrow it, I change it.

If we happened to somehow distinguish ourselves, we quickly napped into place, like rubber bands

Just cause it doesn't look like you thought it would, doesn't mean that you're not living your dream. from Stargirl

Life can be lived as a temporary arrangement. Life is a temporary arrangement! But the longer you go without changing, the more obscure the likelihood you ever will. After enough time passes, the idea of another way of life grows even more misty.