Quotes About Adaptation

On mobile phones: "It looks like a TV remote fucked a little typewriter and this is the bastard offspring

The things we do to stay alive for another year. Another day. Another hour. The deals we make with the universe and ourselves. You start to feel dirty.

I should sit down and make a list of everything I missed while I was gone. If you can't smoke in bars anymore, what other atrocities has the world committed?

Yes, there are vampires. Try to keep up.

It's more than coping. It's adaptation. You go into the dark one species and mutate to fit your surroundings. Grow better eyes and ears. Get used to the feel of the air so you can tell when something is coming at you. After a while you're so suited to the environment you're a whole new species.

That's where you're wrong. When a tidal wave washes out the luau, you surf it and look for land.

Nothing is ever the same the second time. It might be worse. It might be better. But it's never the same. And it's never as simple or innocent as it once might have seemed.

She hands me back the bottle. The stuff we're drinking is vile. Greasy and fishy, but even flounder-flavored turpentine will taste good when it's the only drink in town.

Sometimes, out in the world . . . being exactly what people want and expect . . . well, maybe it isn't a good thing but it's a smart thing.

Maybe I should have kept my rock. At least I wouldn't look quite so much like a deer caught in the headlights. No. I'd look like a deer with a rock. Forget it. We

Short of flamethrowers, nukes, or a bunch of trained Drifter killers, the best strategy is nature's simplest: run like you're a zebra at a waterhole and a pride of lions just showed up with ketchup and silverware.

I'm steel-toed boots in a ballet-slipper world.

The only thing we can control is our response.

George Bernard Shaw lo expresó a la perfección: «El hombre sensato se adapta al mundo. El hombre insensato insiste en intentar que el mundo se adapte a él. Por lo tanto, todo el progreso depende de hombres insensatos».

We can change the way that we think about external events, even where we cannot change them. And we can do something more. We can intelligently change our exposure to events that make us either happy or unhappy.

Bad news has good legs.

Genetically, we are essentially the same creatures as we were at the beginning. We are still hunters and gatherers.

I am not sure of the future," he says, "b."ut I will take it as it comes." Adjust, after the fact. Do not simply react to the possibilities.

A creature designed to look before and after finds that to do the latter has gone out of fashion and that to do the former is becoming impossible.

We in effect challenge the unwanted prodigy to produce forms that slip through our control systems. It does not take much to beat us. One seed in a thousand may germinate later than the last hoeing, pass through the sieve intended to exclude it, show a mysterious immunity to weedkillers. The following year there are five . . .

Weeds vividly demonstrate that natural life – and the course of evolution itself – refuse to be constrained by our cultural concepts. In so doing they make us look closely at the very idea of a divided creation.

By the time I left Phnom Penh I could have written a Cambodian cookbook called 50 Ways to Wok Your Dog.

Like Janus, a software architect needs to be a keeper of doors and passageways, spanning the old and the new, incorporating creativity with sound engineering to fulfill todays requirements while planning to meet tomorrow's expectations.

In the real world, the best architects don't solve hard problems they work around them.