Quotes About Adaptation

W]e are not merely tempered and schooled by failure but compelled, in however subtle a fashion, to become something other than we were.

in regards to his mom and her new boyfriend] At least they never do it while I'm in the house, because that would make me quite literally barf my lentils.

Adaptation for film is, by definition, a process of editorializing.

The screenplay, obliged to work in its own right, is both an argument with the source material and a commentary on it.

Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature.

Chinese migrants had learned from long experience to expect little of governments, and to rely much on the networks of kinship, culture, and trust.

If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.

He was a man caught between two places, one where he would always be a stranger, one where he was no longer a native. Time and change had made him a perpetual traveler, never comfortable again, like many who had lost their homes or those who had traveled across the world, always searching for them.

longer familiar to anyone, not in this new place. Gone are those who understand how you became yourself. Gone are the reasons lurking in the past that might excuse your mistakes. Gone is everything beyond your name on the day of your arrival, and even that may ultimately be surrendered.

We have lost the splendors our ancestors created, and we go elsewhere. People are reminded of that every day here, where an older world, still visible on every corner, fails to hide its superior ways.

In addition to the Self, Jung postulated archetypal components which play specific roles in the psychic development and social adjustment of everyone. These include the ego, persona, shadow, anima, and animus. Jung considered these to be archetypal structures which are built into the personal psyche in the form of complexes during the course of development. Each is a psychic organ operating in accordance with the biological principles of adaptation, homeostasis, and growth.

Through the persona we codify ourselves in a form which we hope will prove acceptable to others.

The oddest consequence of Freud's theory is its implication that, if total sexual fulfilment were possible by means of complete adaptation to reality, the arts, including music, would become otiose. I have discussed the unsatisfactory nature of this conclusion elsewhere.

we may say that reading Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, and Tolstoy enriches our understanding of reality, and therefore enlarges our capacity to enjoy life and enhances our adaptation to it. Shakespeare, Keats, and the other great poets reveal the inner nature of the world and sharpen our sensibilities because their perceptions and their gift for metaphor make it possible for us to transcend our own limited vision by sharing theirs.

Freud's somewhat puritanical vision was that proper, mature adaptation to the world was governed by deliberate thought and rational planning. He would not have countenanced our present proposition: that an inner world of phantasy is part of man's biological endowment, and that it is the inevitable discrepancy between this inner world and the outer world that compels men to become inventive and imaginative.

The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of 'adaptation through maladaptation' which is characteristic of our species…the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.

Not to unlearn what you have learned is the most necessary kind of learning.

Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.

Mad is the man who is forever gritting his teeth against that granite block, complete and changeless, of the past.

The human mind adjusts itself to a certain point of view, and those who have regarded nature from one angle, during a portion of their life, can adopt new ideas only with difficulty.

Dans la nature rien ne se crée, rien ne se perd, tout change. In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes.

In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with humans it is the other way around: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.

Every relationship I've been in becomes long-distance because of work. It's never worked out. It puts an intense strain on the relationship, and at a certain point, it becomes too difficult.

They saw him walk away, leave a world he'd never really been part of. They saw him pull his hat down low and get onto his bike. He forgot the Walkman's earplugs. Maybe, Anna thought, he didn't need them anymore; maybe the white noise had finally made it into his head.