Quotes About Adaptation

Rather than go on suffering, he had learned to stultify himself to introspection. Time had lost its multidimensional scope. There was only the present for Robert Neville; a present based on day-to-day survival marked by neither heights of joy nor depths of despair. I am predominantly vegetable, he often thought to himself. That was the way he wanted it.

He'd been a great one for looking for greener pastures. He'd kept looking until all his pastures were brown with time.

A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel --root and stem--in a great U-turn until it rights itself. But a human child can know it's pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

Every belief will be outgrown, in time. The first lesson of the universe is to never reason from only a single instance. Unless you only have one instance. In which case: find another.

The web: yet another total disorientation that becomes status quo without anyone realizing it.

It had to be U. U. was the only town I could still bear, the one spot in the atlas I'd already absorbed head-on. When you take too many of your critical hits in one place, that place can no longer hurt you.

Like evolution, it reuses all the old, successful parts of everything that has come before. Like evolution, it just means unfolding.

When removed from their kind, individual human beings can change in remarkable ways .

And the goal of the game will be to figure out what the new and desperate world wants from you.

A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

The bird and the fish may fall in love but where will they build their nest?

We are not...wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.

We'd drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.

The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.

But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no "Robin," no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.

A body can take two weeks of anything.

Clicks and chatter disturb the cathedral hush. The air is so twilight-green she feels like she's underwater. It rains particles—spore clouds, broken webs and mammal dander, skeletonized mites, bits of insect frass and bird feather. . . . Everything climbs over everything else, fighting for scraps of light. If she holds still too long, vines will overrun her.

A forest takes care of itself, even as it builds the local climate it needs to survive.

Life is nothing but mutual infection. And every infecting message changes the message it infects.

This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

lot of folks think trees are simple things, incapable of doing anything interesting. But there's a tree for every purpose under heaven. Their chemistry is astonishing. Waxes, fats, sugars. Tannins, sterols, gums, and carotenoids. Resin acids, flavonoids, terpenes. Alkaloids, phenols, corky suberins. They're learning to make whatever can be made. And most of what they make we haven't even identified.

Time alters what can be owned, and who may do the owning.

Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There's work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same.

But the spruces pour out messages in media of their own invention. They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they've lived through.