Quotes About Adaptation

According to the laws of evolution, a species develops in a certain direction until that development is no longer well adapted for survival. At that point, a mutation occurs. Although the mutation doesn't represent the majority of the species, it represents the line of evolution better adapted for the species' survival. The descendants of the mutation are then the ones to survive.

Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn't help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient books summoned via pneumatic tubes, the archives, the quiet. I had found something rare there: an inexhaustible wonder.

I understood—I thought I understood—then things changed, or I learned the next thing that made everything I knew before obsolete.

Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.

I thought I had learned not to set my heart on anything.

It was probably best just to be quiet and wait until the conversation changed, as conversations will when no one is saying anything.

I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires. It would have been much harder for them to roost in the sunlight, which is a thing they clearly enjoy doing.

I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires.

I don't write the way I speak. I'm afraid you would think I didn't know any better. I don't write the way I do for the pulpit, either, insofar as I can help it. That would be ridiculous, in the circumstances. I do try to write the way I think. But of course that all changes as soon as I put it into words. And the more it does seem to be my thinking, the more pulpitish it sounds, which I guess is inevitable. I will resist that inflection, nevertheless.

Theories about world literature, of which fairy tale is a fundamental part, emphasize the porousness of borders, geographical and inguistic: no frontiercan keep a good story from roaming. It will travel, and travel far, and travel back again in a different guise, a changed mood, and, above all, a new meaning.

Don had made a fewer mistakes and learned from every one of them

dormitorio? Kay, después de beber un buen sorbo, sonrió y repuso: —Bueno. Para ella, todo fue casi igual a como había sido antes, salvo que Michael era ahora más rudo, más directo, menos tierno.

What's past is past," Gronevelt said. "Never go back. Not for excuses. Not for justification, not for happiness. You are what you are, the world is what it is."  

Everything went right for him until that final year. Then why didn't he recover? Change or die he once said. That was what life was all about. And he simply couldn't change.

Aquí cambian las personas, teniente, nunca las cosas.

Por más que uno fuera precavido y planeara sus acciones con la mayor lucidez, la vida, más compleja que todos los cálculos, hacía estallar los esquemas y los reemplazaba por situaciones inciertas y contradictorias.

A literatura é como um corpo vivo que se vai transformando segundo o contexto em que habita

MVLL: Los libros cambian con los tiempos. Con la evolución de la vida cotidiana, los libros se ven desde otra perspectiva y pueden llegar a cambiar de una manera muy profunda

Usted ha de acostumbrarse a la vida y ha de aprender a reír. (Prólogo de El lobo estepario).

That was women for you -- always morphing. One minute they were helpless, needing shelter and English muffins, the next they were ruthlessly bending you to their will like you were a piece of sheet metal.

Grab what you can and fight your way to a lifeboat.' Everyone associated with the slow printed word is fast becoming the Great Crested Newt of the culture. First it was the poets, the playwrights, then the novelists. Veteran newspapermen are next.

It appeared in the Internet age, pianos, like physical books, were fast becoming culturally extinct. They'd probably stay that way unless Apple invented the iPiano, which fit inside your pocket and could be mastered via text message. With the iPiano, anyone can be an iMozart. Then, you could compose your own iRequiem for your own iFuneral attended by millions of your iFriends who iLoved you.

The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else's rules.