Quotes About Adaptation

New teachers were just a part of life, for a few days after one arrived, squawks of interest were emitted from various corners, but then they died away as the teacher was absorbed like everyone else...before you knew it, the fresh ones seemed to have been teaching there forever too, or else they didn't last very long, and were gone before you'd gotten to know them.

It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.

Sometimes you had to let go of your convictions, or at least loosen them far more than you ever thought you would.

It wasn't that Faith had become political in some sort of moment of epiphany; it was more that the world had moved and she had moved too.

We can't be afraid of change, or else we'll miss out on everything.

In a new environment, it was possible to transform.

I hadn't known that if you hold on, if you force yourself as hard as you can to find some kind of patience in the middle of all your impatience, things can change. It's big, and it's always incredibly messy. But there's no way around the mess.

You get used to whatever you get.

Greer, Zee, and Chloe were an unlikely trio, but she had heard this was typical of social life in the first weeks of college. People who had nothing in common were briefly and emotionally joined, like the members of a jury or the survivors of a plane crash

Married life proved not very different from premarried life, except now there was the desire for solidity instead of expansion.

you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're

I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.

In the past," a writer friend of Ethan's had recently said, over lots of beer, "everyone wanted to be novelists. And now they all want to be screenwriters. It's like screenplays are the same exact thing as novels, but easier to read and worth a lot more money.

Women have to live so much of their life in the in-betweens.

It's just nature," I point out, wiping my lab bench, the sweet smell of the ethanol solvent. "Put animals in a small, closed space, and the one with the sharpest nails, the pointiest teeth wins." He gins. "Or maybe it's just like musical chairs?" It's a luxury to view it so lightly. But I nod. It's best never to let them see your teeth.

You really only learn your place, her mother once said, when you're left in it.

He wished he knew how they did it. Even planning for the next day was beyond his capabilities. He didn't understand how to think that way, how to plan, and he wanted to. He wanted to understand how people mapped out their lives, how they went so easily through a day. How they managed to keep from destroying the people around them, destroying themselves. He looked down at his arm, at the too-smooth stump, the thick pink ridge of scar. Christ, how did they do it? How did Genie do it?

We do not stay as we were born, none of us." I poured a glass of wine. "We are all made. And this—what I am—was nothing but one more choice in a sea of choices.

It was my favorite characteristic of musicians. They were competitive and jealous, but unlike poets or writers or painters, musicians borrowed and built upon old foundations and acknowledged the genius of before. They used it. One discovered, and others embraced, embroidered, and embellished, twisting and shaping it into something that was quite their own, even as it held echoes of the past.

When everything changes we learn who we really are. What's really important. What we want most. We discover the truth in moments of disarray.

There's nothing that says you can't change." "Not even if it changes everything else?" I shook my head. "Not even then.

Bess hadn't ever been good with change. She'd never been good with taking leaps of faith, or risks or changes. When something worked, she tended to stick with it. Even when something didn't.

PERMALINK · 169465 · 15 HOURS AGO "She tried to feel sad, or guilty, or even to be angry about the way things had happened, but there frankly wasn't much room in either her head or her heart for wishing or moping.

The past is gone, Claire. It's like a sand castle washed away by the waves. We can remember what it looked like, but even if we build it again, it won't be the exactly the same.