Quotes About Adaptation

You may find that when you try to live in two worlds you are at home in neither of them.

How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.

It shouldn't have hurt. She should be used to it by

only the most hardy of living things survive renewal.

Right now, let's get back to the other connections between what happened and the things you quit doing, quit enjoying.

It is easy to fool people into thinking I am like everyone else in encounters like this. If the other person likes to talk, as this woman did, it is easier. All I have to say are a few conventional things and smile, and it is done.

As you read, keep in mind that no author will parallel your beliefs 100 percent, so you must learn to take from each one the ideas that work best for your family.

I felt about him as I might feel about a friendly, dimwitted dog that had decided to move in with us. He could not be cast out into the street, but he was shedding all over the furniture.

You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

Traits don't change, states of mind do.

If we do not alter with the times, the times yet alter us. We may stand perfectly still, but our surroundings shift round and we are not in the same relationship to them for long; just as a chameleon, matching perfectly the greenness of a leaf, should know that the leaf will one day fade.

People are different in different places,' he thought hazily. 'And if they're all right in one place, it's best to leave them there.

It's in the air. You have to get fond of people here.

Die perfekte Frau bemüht sich darum, das verhalten von Streichhölzern und Aschenbechern nachzuahmen, indem sie Nützlichkeit mit Schweigen verbindet.

Dogs being great linguists, she quickly picked up English, far more quickly than I picked up German, so we understood each other very well, and couche, schönmachen, and pfui continued for a long time to be my whole vocabulary. Fortunately

Faced by the accomplished fact, it was really rather useless for him to mind. What was the good of minding the actual and the fininshed? ....to allow oneself to be upset because something had been done which one considers a pity, or even disastrous, is to double the misfortune. Why throw after what is already gone one's own good temper and serenity?

The evil times had come of eking out, of making do. At least, my husband seemed to regard the times we had arrived at as evil, but that was because he was in the unfortunate position of having a past to compare them with. I, who had practically no past, and whose family had never fallen from glory for the reason that it had had no glory to fall from, thought the times wholly delightful; and anyhow I rather liked camphor.

a little here, bends a little there. And far too often

Divorce has taught us how to sleep with friends, sleep with enemies, and then act like it's all perfectly normal in the morning.

I tell each of them whatever it is I think they want to hear because it is the only way to guarantee that either of them will love me. Insofar as a truth existed for me, it changed depending on whether I was with my mom or my dad.

We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

The corollary of constant change is ignorance. This is not often talked about: we computer experts barely know what we're doing. We're good at fussing and figuring out. We function well in a sea of unknowns. Our experience has only prepared us to deal with confusion. A programmer who denies this is probably lying, or else is densely unaware of himself.

the old, less rigidly organized Christianity of the Celtic Church lingered stubbornly there, even though the Roman rite had prevailed. They would accept a runaway novice, all the more when they heard him sing and play; they would provide him a patron and a house harp, and strip him of his skirts and find him chausses and shirt and cotte in payment for his music.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.