Quotes About Adaptation

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.

We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.

There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...

Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.

All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging..

Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up.

But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.

You'll say things all wrong but they'll at once become American ways of saying things. You won't know shit but it'll right away become an American type of ignorance. Not belonging, that's an old American tradition, see?, that's the American way.

I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began.

This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think?

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.

The old man has always believed in the mutability of things; has known that no matter how solid the ground beneath your feet may seem, it can, at any moment, turn into quicksand and suck you down. Always be prepared.

?ôi khi núi non ph?i ??i d?i ?? c? nhân ???c tái ngá»™.

The ancient wisdoms are modern nonsenses. Live in your own time, use what we know, and as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you and put aside childish things.

Anybody who's spent any time with machines at all,' he added, 'and baby, that's us all, knows first and foremost there's only one thing certain about them, computer or bicycle. They go wrong.

Say we are from nowhere or anywhere or somewhere, we are make-believe people, frauds, reinventions, shapeshifters, which is to say, Americans.

In my family we've always found the world's air hard to breathe; we arrive hoping for somewhere better.

Normal doesn't feel so normal to me, I tell him. It's normal to feel that way, he replies.

Then she found him. - And maybe he'd invented her, too, a little bit, invented someone worth rushing out of one's old life to love. - Nothing so remarkable in that. Happens often enough; and the two inventors go on, rubbing the rough edges off one another, adjusting their inventions, moulding imagination to actuality, learning how to be together; or not. It works out or it doesn't.

We are other than what we would have been if we had crossed the oceans, if or mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top.

The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.

And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.