Quotes About Adaptation

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.

Don't waste your energies kicking against an open door,

Yesterday it worked Today it is not working Windows is like that

those who were born at the depths of one great crisis who would be able to cope with the next.

Socialism is like one of those horrible viruses. You no sooner discover a remedy for one version, than it spontaneously evolves into another.

Nothing at all, but I'm not sure I'm ready for it. I'd hate to get used to something I'm not ready for.

Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and new order emerges.

How can people stay sane in a world that makes no sense?

Children always wanted their parents in situ, in stasis. The faster they changed, the more their parents should remain the same.

If what we change does not change us, we are playing with blocks.

Civil rights. The New Left. Black Power. Feminism. Gay rights. To be remade so many times in one generation is surely a blessing.

Remarriage is an excellent test of just how amicable your divorce was.

You must watch and wait, Branza, to see what powers you have and don't have. It is not like home. We ruled there. Everything fell into place around what we wanted. Here, we are not the only ones wanting, and we must make room for other people's desires.

And then she fell, from standing, foot-fins together, straight into the wavelets, where she was now seal, and she flung herself down toward the deeper water.

All along, he'd been looking in the wrong direction, trying to make time stand still, to re-create the past, but everything in life taught the opposite.

When Grinnell approached her, she cried quietly into her hands but let him lead her to the water, where she washed and changed into the calico dress an officer's wife had sent from the fort. Now, free of face paint and hair dye, and wearing Anglo garb, she was ready — or at least dressed — for her return.

Mistakes are expected, respected, and investigated

When the end of the world comes, it won't be the ones that cry who survive, but the ones who spit.

Life has a way of turning things around. Those who mourn well know this. As a result, they also live well--with courage and curiosity.

We routinely replace damanged parts of ourselves with new ones that are, arguably, more resilient, more able to handle challenges. As long as we avoid the trap of growing our skin so thick that nothing gets through, getting bruised can only boost our ability to cope with whatever life throws at us.

From this perspective, creativity is a means of diffusing and managing loss, of transforming it into something that we can tolerate and live through, and, in the long run, perhaps even use as a basis for new life.

As Winnicott remarks, social existence, though obviously indispensable for organized human communities, can induce us to regard the world primarily "as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation." For Winnicott, this type of social compliance is a form of psychic illness, which suggests that the vast majority of us are unwell much of the time. As he claims, "social health is mildly depressive— except for holidays.

Within this mercurial reality, our happiness depends less on how well or badly we tackle the myriad ordeals of our lives than on how dexterously we withstand the fact that the ground underneath our feet shifts constantly.

When I was younger, I walked on my toes and made clicking sounds with my tongue. A therapist taught me how to stop.