Quotes About Adaptation

But you can't go back. Not ever. You have to pick up the pieces and keep moving ahead.

My ears are too beeg for my head. My head ees too beeg for my body. I am not a Siamese cat ... I AM A CHIHUAHUA! -- Skippyjon Jones (In his very best Spanish accent)

I ask to be made beautiful like the trees are beautiful, each growing according to a unique plan. Lop off a limb and and the tree will accommodate it's loss, still growing and still beautiful. It is my hope to be able to flourish in a similar fashion, taking on the shape and dimensions that is intended for me.

All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities of life.

Usne yeh nahi kaha ke usey bhichadna hain mujhse Bas dheere-dheere baatein kam kardi

There are going to be many changes, I warn you. I want no officer who is not prepared to do everything that his men have to do. Not only that-he must be able to do it better.

The progress of the world is retarded only by those who do not fill the places they are holding; they belong to a former age and a lower stage or plane of life, and their tendency is toward degeneration.

If the masses begin to move forward as suggested in this book, neither governments nor industrial systems can check them; all systems must be modified to accommodate the forward movement.

Because you are not in the right business or the right environment now, do not think that you must postpone action until you get into the right business or environment.

The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks

It is not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.

What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any.

He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself that pretty soon people begin adapting themselves to him.

Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life ... I wonder if you ever reached it.

He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden as an elbow in the solar plexus.

When you're nailing a custard pie to the wall, and it starts to wilt, it doesn't do any good to hammer in more nails.

Civilizations grow and change and decline - they aren't remade.

For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities. It is the product not of the boomers but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.

All history is modern history.

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.

A woman's life can really be a succession of lives, each revolving around some emotionally compelling situation or challenge, and each marked off by some intense experience.

That's the trouble with survival of the fittest, isn't it, Dominick? The corpse at your feet. That little inconvenience.

Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.

If you can't win, don't join them; learn how to lose.