Quotes About Adaptation

I stand on the corner, pretending I am a tree.

Freedom, like everything else, is relative.

Her glass wings are gone.

If you don't like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change for the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...

People change, though, especially after they are dead.

Experiences were what you got when you couldn't get what you wanted.

She doesn't think it's a good idea to know the future, because you can hardly ever change it, so why suffer twice?

I've been prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence.

Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace.

But the adjectives change," said Jimmy. "Nothing's worse than last year's adjectives.

We get along by a symbiotic adjustment of habits and with a minimum of that pale-mauve hostility you often find among women.

We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

She's against it on principle, and life isn't run on principles but by adjustments

A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there's less of you.

there was little that was truly original or indigenous to Gilead. Its genius was synthesis.

But I was the daughter of a Naiad. Behave like water, I told myself. Don't try to oppose them. When they try to grasp you, slip through their fingers. Flow around them.

If you can't stop the waves, go sailing.

But how can you have a sense of wonder if you're prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.

It's strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the everexpanding perimeters of our lives.

I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife… as if I'm lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That's why I'm not allowed a knife.

In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange objects.

They say, Grace, why don't you ever smile or laugh, we never see you smiling, and I say I suppose Miss I have gotten out of the way of it, my face won't bend in that direction any more.