Quotes About Adaptation

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

That is a reconstruction, too.

This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

Attack, voracious eating, and flight: it's a sound routine for staying alive on edges.

But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

When your main game's over, you can always move your chessboard elsewhere.

There are a great many buttocks in this room. I am no longer used to them.

Su madre aprovechó para decir que el problema con las personas de otra cultura era que nunca sabía uno si estaban locos o no, porque sus pautas de comportamiento eran muy distintas. Los agentes se mostraron de acuerdo con ella, con deferencia pero también con condescendencia, como si fuese una completa imbécil a quien había que complacer.

at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

while he himself puts them on, like a sock over a foot, onto the stub of himself, his extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye, which extrudes, expands, winces, and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again, bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf, into them, avid for vision.

but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

Lately he's been treating her like white noise, like the rivulet sound on their sleep machine. This would once have hurt her Ã¢â'¬â€œ did hurt her Ã¢â'¬â€œ but now it suits her fine. She

But that's where I am, there's no escaping it. Time's a trap, I'm caught in it. I must forget about my secret name and all ways back. My name is Offred now, and here is where I live.

did I think it would nonetheless be business as usual? Because we'd been hearing these things for so long, I suppose. You don't believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.

The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances.

How little time it takes to change a face: carve it like wood, harden it.

Think of an adaptation, any adaptation, and some animal somewhere will have thought of it first.

We rarely choose what is subtracted from our lives, but we can choose how we respond. How we reorganize our lives in order to move forward.

In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever a civilization breaks up. The people who have brains and courage come through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out.

T]he merciful adjustment which nature makes when what cannot be cured must be endured.

Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet & dancing slippers had slipped away & there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies & turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage except the indestructible red earth on which she stood.

War and marriage and childbirth had passed over her without touching any deep chord within her and she was unchanged.

Well, none of us, as far as I can see, are doing what we intended to do right now, but I think we'll make out just the same. It's a poor person and a poor nation that sits down and cries because life isn't precisely what they expected it to be.