Quotes About Adaptation

There were other things we noticed only at first, before we accepted them as a part of daily life. Then they got harder to describe, the way it's hard to describe what it feels like to breathe air.

A missionary plods through the first year or two, thinking that things will be different when he speaks the language. He is baffled to find, frequently, that they are not.

We will never like this reality or make it okay, but eventually we accept it.

When a proto-type—a new initiative—doesn't work, we face two alternatives: one is to bitch about reality and the other is to harvest the gift it just gave us, the knowledge of what has to be corrected.

People aren't the same when they've lived in India. It changes them, I've often noticed it.

They had learned a lot in those lean times. Brilliant, gifted students, both of them, cosseted and given awards and appreciated; it had come as a rude shock. It had taught them to woo audiences, to ignore their surroundings, to welcome their listeners, however few; and to please them.

The seasons tell us, everything in organic life tells us, that there is no holding on; still, we try to do just that. Sometimes, though, we learn the kind of wisdom that celebrates the open hand.

This is life, uh? We lose something here; we get something there. The trick is to stop looking in the old place to find the new thing.

For a long time, we have known that sometimes it serves you best simply to work around an obstacle, to make invisible what you are tired of seeing or don't understand.

I don't know why I can't stop crying. Too much good news lately, I guess. Bad news I can handle. I expect bad news. I've dealt with bad news all my life. Good news makes me cry.

And when you lose something, you have to remember that then there is room for the next thing. And there is always a next thing.

We are meant to use what we have, whatever it is. We are meant to be less mindful of our insides, more outwardly directed.

Life is what happens to you while you're failing to plan it.

I can still see the green feathers if I look hard enough. But they've done their best to make you into a sparrow, haven't they?

One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.

The world ain't straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there's a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn't care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain't straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don't mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.

What worked yesterday doesn't always work today.

Time -- when pursued like a bandit -- will behave like one; always remaining one country or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping ou the back door of the motel just as you're banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you.

You must learn in life to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.

Resist change at your own peril, Vivian. When something ends, let it end.

Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies

It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated.

Whatever you do, try not to dwell too long on your failures. You don't need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.