Quotes About Adaptation

Nothing is more conservative than a bacterium.

The myosin in our own skeletal muscles is more closely related to the myosin driving the flight muscles of that irritating housefly buzzing around your head than it is to the myosin in the muscles of your own sphincters

All those years we'd spent learning these chops, and all those gigs in Germany where you'd play all night, and along comes punk. It has nothing to do with that. A lot of people went out of business.

We eventually ended up with enough left-over material that we considered releasing it as a second album, including a set we dubbed 'The Big Spliff', the kind of ambient mood music that we were bemused to find being adopted by bands like the Orb,

Great leaders do not rush to make changes because of failure.

Like a cookie crumbled but you eat it anyway, life is.

We are all matelots of perception – our sails adjusted consequently.

Complacency's like a disease to wild things.

It was one of the most pernicious fallacies, common the world over: old ways are best. But old ways can outlast their usefulness. Old ways can live on pointlessly in worlds that have no room for them.

Older people were immigrants in their own country. They had not been born to the idea of rapid change, not like us.

Hwl's thumping began to slow as her cream turned to butter.

They'd left behind their stone houses in Caer Luel and beautiful white fountains, their red-tile roofs and straight roads, their perfectly round red bowls with pictures of dogs hunting deer around the rim, their exact corners and glass cups. And now the marble statues had lost their paint and stood melancholy white streaked with moss; tiles had blown off in storms and been patched with reed; men built fire sands directly on the cracked and broken remnants of once-brilliant mosaics.

She stepped to one side of her feelings like stepping out of her clothes.

Sometimes the body acclimitizes so thoroughly that we forget things have ever been different.

Until she knew how these newcomers thought and what they wanted, she would keep it that way, keep her dice rolling in her cup. It was foolish to throw before all bets were on the table.

The rhythms of the household had changed.

She might wear a blade, but she also wears skirts, priest, like you. So she will learn. Teach her. But not about your Christ. There'll be others for that, in time.

When I was young, it was about winning, about making the other do what I want. But sometime in the last ten years…Well, I changed." She didn't look at Eric, but I got the impression their feet were touching under the table. "Now instead of charging at people, sword drawn, I find it much more enjoyable and productive to run alongside them, learn their stride and rhythm, whether or not we could run together in the long term.

One day, to suit some purpose of their own, her mother or her uncle would pluck her from her life and send her to live in a fen with a man she didn't know. In the world of skirt and sword, it was part of her wyrd. But not all her wyrd, and not yet. There was so much to learn, so much to know.

Here she was Stranger Woman, or the SEC rep. Not Marguerite Angelica Taishan, not Marghe. She wondered if that person existed anymore.

We're like the moths," Begu said. "The priests and Uinniau and Cian are like bats. When we go back to York, we'll have to stop, lie down, for a while.

She looked, left and right. She couldn't see as much as she'd like; the unfamiliar veil got in the way. No doubt she'd learn to manage that, how to use it to her advantage, as her mother did.

She moved faster, and so did he. She leaned farther, and so did he. Then she began to draw on the life around her-the hum in the air, the flight of the kicked dirt-and changed again.

The sense of the world shifting was so strong she swayed in the saddle.