Quotes About Adaptation

The second mistake is the tacit assumption that first you go to school, and when you are done, you go get a job. This made sense when jobs and skills changed on a generational timescale, but it does not in today's fast-moving labor markets. These two phases of life need to be strongly interleaved, or at least the opportunity for new skill acquisition must be explicit and omnipresent.

Which is the point: the future looks a lot more like the past than you might expect.

Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.

The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing museums are scaling back.

The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art.

All art comes from other art, and all immigrants come from other places.

I would, if one-armned and jonesing, doubtless have found a way to cook up a hearty spoon of Mexican tar and slam it with my toes. (I met a double amputee in San Francisco whose girlfriend slapped a bra strap around his throat and geezed him in the neck. Another triumph of the human spirit. But slap me if I get sentimental...)

I love technology, and I love new gadgets. I can no longer figure out how to use any of them, but I love them.

there's no point in mourning mistakes when you can fix them

Small-town kids are pebbles in a river, pushed around by the flow, forming pockets and piles, reforming when the current picks up and we find ourselves in a whole new cluster.

If you want a baby, have a new one. Don't baby the old one.

Life's a shock to the young. Shock to have an old man for a father instead of an angel. Shock to eat ham gravy instead of dew drops. And to like ham gravy. That's the worst shock of all. Find yourself fitting into this sorry world.

That's the trouble with the hospital-they find all the things that have been killing you forever, and that you are okay with, you're okay with those things slowly killing you, but then they find them and get rid of them, and then other things replace the things you were fine with, and you are not fine, not fine at all with the new things, and so you die, slowly, in utter misery, just the way you would have before, only before you were pretty okay with the manner of it, but now you're not.

read widely because almost nothing has been everywhere applied.

Society will decide after the technology is created what we will and won't accept.

Why?" Kieran grinned. "'Cause you can't dance, it's too wet to plow, and it's a little windy to be stacking chickens.

What parts of this life are you willing to give up, so you can keep on living?

She talked about getting some Pam cooking spray—or WD-40, but Pam was cheaper—because coating the walls of the toilet chutes with it makes waste less likely to stick.

In the widening gap between credits and debits hangs a question: What parts of this life are you willing to give up, so you can keep on living? Most who face this dilemma will not end up dwelling in vehicles. Those who do are analogous to what biologists call an "indicator species"—sensitive organisms with the capacity to signal much larger shifts in an ecosystem.

The truth as I see it is that people can both struggle and remain upbeat simultaneously, through even the most soul-testing of challenges. This doesn't mean they're in denial. Rather, it testifies to the remarkable ability of humankind to adapt, to seek meaning and kinship when confronted with adversity.

Before, it was just about making the films - and now it's releasing them. Which is a steep learning curve.

I learned what I need to do in the long jump, what I needed to do in the javelin and I've been able to rectify those events. It's been a bit of a learning curve, which is good.

Second is, don't try to change user behavior dramatically. If you are expecting people to dramatically change the way they do things, it's not going to happen. Try to make it such that it's a small change, yet an important one.