Quotes About Adaptation

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?

Hell, at twenty, he'd been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more months. He wanted to keep going forward, not stop and turn around and analyze the validity of decisions made and courses charted long ago.

He wasn't always trying to say witty things, and when he did say them, he felt no need to repeat them for changing company.

Institutional changes, instead of following the path of a guided arrow, head in different and often conflicting directions: a profitable operating unit is suddenly sold, for example, yet a few years later the parent company tries to get back into the business in which it knew how to make money before it sought to reinvent itself. Such twists have prompted the sociologists Scott Lash and John Urry to speak more largely of flexibility as "the end of organized capitalism.

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we'll never get used to it.

Thanks to our capacity to adapt to ever greater fame and fortune, yesterday's luxuries can soon become today's necessities and tomorrow's relics."6

I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.

he had lived within the narrow grooves of habit so long that he had learned to see in his dark world without the aid of eyes

Having no claims upon others, I bent the way the wind blew, rendering unto my environment that which was my environment's, and rendering unto myself that which I felt was mine.

System changes come directly from thinking changes.

Fixing feels like motion, but is not always progress.

Maybe some of these new changes in her life weren't going to be so bad after all.

Squealing, Ashley threw her arms around Miranda, while Gage ducked swiftly out of the way. "You'll get used to her, Miranda," Parker sighed, pulling Ashley back.

By a decade after the 1521 fall of Tenochtitlán, the Mexican natives had already adopted a new set of flavors into their existing large assortment. There seemed to be an "absence of strong cultural resistance to the introduction and use of foreign plants," as one researcher found recently when he tried to discover what had become of so many of those pre-Columbian crops in modern Mexico.11

This can't be real. It can't be. You just don't wake up to another day, go along living your life then—bang—without warning, without a chance to prepare, in a heartbeat, everything changes.

Demagnetizing is a fact of life.

I have found on occasion that the Italians are suspicious of the benefits of air-conditioning. Or skeptical, or resistant, or oblivious to the benefits of air-conditioning.

Getting something and having the wits to use it...those are two different things.

Survive first. Figure out crayon drawing of destiny later.

Leo drummed his fingers. "Great. I should have installed a smoke screen that makes the ship smell like a giant chicken nugget. Remind me to invent that, next time." Hazel frowned. "What is a chicken nugget?" "Oh, man…" Leo shook his head in amazement. "That's right. You've missed the last, like, seventy years. Well, my apprentice, a chicken nugget—" "Doesn't matter," Annabeth interrupted.

Don't stay in one place too long. It was the only way to stay ahead of the sadness.

Sometimes, it takes us a while to appreciate something new, something that might change us for the better.

Sometimes you have to lose a piece to win a game.

Frank tugged again with no luck. Even Hazel was trying not to laugh. Frank grimaced with concentration. Suddenly, he disappeared. On the deck where he'd been standing, a green iguana crouched next to an empty set of Chinese handcuffs. "Well done, Frank Zhang," Leo said dryly, doing his impression of Chiron the centaur. "That is exactly how people beat Chinese handcuffs. They turn into iguanas.