Quotes About Adaptation

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

Grips slipped. Hers had from every surface. She's shaped nothing after all, only been crushed and reshaped. No wonder she felt for the brownstones, the cripples, now filling chaotically with no regard for her plan.

Once I had it free, I gobbled the sandwich like a nature-film otter cracking an oyster on its stomach: knees up in the wiring under the dashboard, my elbows jammed against the steering wheel, my chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth.

You can't reclaim a thing that changes as you touch it.

It's important to know the past, but your survival depends on knowing the present.

Call it the Darwinian contradiction. We come down from the trees and walk upright and what do we get for it? Foot pain! Bad backs! We cease living sexual lives regulated by mating seasons, by hormonal tides or the rotation of the earth and what happens? Marital misery. Divorce. Rape.

With writing, we have second chances.

The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.

Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.

I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

Our minds and hearts are well built to perform certain tasks, and poorly designed for others. We are good at things like calculating the path of a hurricane, and bad at things like deciding to get out of its way.

La Naturaleza se satisface con muy poco y que la necesidad es madre de la invención.

frequently exercised in my sight, to accustom themselves to me.

If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, scum it well, and it will give the soup a high French taste.

Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flay the carcass; the skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.

The lucky individual that finds a different seed, or nook, or niche, will fly up and out from beneath the Sisyphean rock of competition. It will tend to flourish and so will its descendants—that is, those that inherit the lucky character that had set it a little apart. Individuals that diverge from the madding crowd will tend to prosper, while the rest will be ground down.

Darwin argues, essentially, that all the sophistications we see in the eagle's or the human's eye could have arisen gradually, by stages, across geological spans of time, each stage conferring somewhat clearer vision than the one before.

Peter suspects that the caltrop is evolving in response to the finches. Where the struggle for existence is fierce, the caltrop that is likeliest to succeed is the plant that puts more energy into spines and less into seeds; but in the safer, more secluded spot, the fittest plants are the ones that put more energy into making seeds and less energy into protecting them. The finches may be driving the evolution of caltrop while caltrop is driving the evolution of the finches.

Cactus finches do more with cactus than Plains Indians did with buffalo. They nest in cactus; they sleep in cactus; they often copulate in cactus; they drink cactus nectar; they eat cactus flowers, cactus pollen, and cactus seeds. In return they pollinate the cactus, like bees.

animals differ radically among islands that have "the same geological nature

Life is always poised for flight. From a distance it looks still, silhouetted against the bright sky or the dark ground; but up close it is flitting this way and that, as if displaying to the world at every moment its perpetual readiness to take off in any of a thousand directions.

no esperar de nosotros ni de nuestras parejas ser los mismos, sino aceptar la sorpresa de quién es el otro que tengo al lado hoy, y sorprendernos a nosotros mismos siendo otros todo el tiempo.

Vivir esos cambios es animarnos a permitir que las cosas dejen de ser para que den lugar a otras nuevas cosas.

El duelo es el doloroso proceso normal de elaboración de una pérdida, tendiente a la adaptación y armonización de nuestra situación interna y externa frente a una nueva realidad.