Quotes About Adaptation

When you lose your home country, what do you preserve and what do you abandon?

When you're held underwater, you think only of air. I remember how I felt about Shanghai in the days after our lives changed - how streets that had once seemed exciting suddenly stank of nightsoil, how beautiful women suddenly were nothing more than girls with three holes, how all the money and prosperity suddenly rendered everything forlon, dissolute and futile. The way I see Los Angeles and Chinatown during these difficult and frightening days couldn't be more different.

People are shaped by the earth and water around them.

What's your first impression of a new place? Is it the first meal you eat? Your first ice cream cone? The first person you meet? The first night you spend in your new bed in your new home? The first broken promise?

She's grabbed onto old traditions-outdated traditions- in the same way I latch onto them now: as a means of survival, as a way to hang on to ghost memories.

Don't you agree? Swordplay is a dance of sorts, an understanding of the logical, most sophisticated next step. Except that in a fight, one must take the unexpected step. In dance it is all about taking the right, expected step.

And sometimes, God asks us to wrestle with the unfamiliar until it becomes our new familiar. Until we can breathe freely in that new place.

Nobody told you that wen you became a parent, you became a child again; it was early bedtimes and grilled cheese sandwiches for all. Every date night was a negotiation, every invitation that you actually had the desire or energy to accept became a strategic maneuver that may or may not work out after all.

But there was something more true, more solid about loving someone through change.

It's about biology, genetics, of course. But most of all, it's about what you do with what you're given.

Wasn't there some belief about how if you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump right out? But if you put it in cold water and turn up the heat gradually, it will allow itself to slowly cook to death?

Some things don't leave us. We just learn to live with them better.

worked. But she could live with it. "So

A better reason why we, and other intelligent species, are born with such poorly developed brains is so that we can learn.

And when things start to go wrong, a good boss doesn't just fire everybody and start over.

Are you nervous about no longer being a big fish in a small pond?

Lisi Harrison

A relationship can push us into having to confront certain areas of life, even if natally we are neither predisposed nor well equipped to cope in that area.

Stale water is a poor drink," said Annlaw. "Stale skill is worse. And the man who walks in his own footsteps only ends where he began.

We're the ones who will fill in the blank places. Maybe we can make it different.

All of it was new to him. After a life of Sameness and predictability, he was awed by the surprises that lay beyond each curve of the road.

I don't know what she is now. A stranger, mostly. It's as if she has become a part of a different world, one that doesn't include me anymore....

The important thing is that another medium—stage, film, music—doesn't obliterate a book. The movie is here now, on a big screen, with stars and costumes and a score. But the book hasn't gone away. It has simply grown up, grown larger, and begun to glisten in a new way.

Then I went home to continue my life, which had changed a little, as lives do every day, inching by microspecks forward toward whatever surprises are coming next.