Quotes About Adaptation

Chickens have a twenty-minute memory. We primates cope through booze and denial. Dial up more of that denial part, you'll last longer.

Times have changed. People live longer, but that hasn't translated into longer childhoods.

Moral: If at first you don't succeed, invent fire. Or hire a chef. Preferably one with imagination. Jane Yolen

I'm lucky to have a leg at all," Heldt had once told him. "The fucking surgeon was a butcher. He should have cut the fucking thing off and handed me a crutch." The cinema was his crutch.

The Cinderella Game Kelly Link

You know how in our brains, behind all the recent flashy developments that gave us stuff like emotions and aesthetics and cosmic awareness, there's this lizard brain. It's what makes the heart beat and what stays alert to odd noises and sudden movements in the dark while we sleep. Don't wonder where the dinosaurs went, there's a bit of one inside each of us.

Be open to learning new lessons even if they contradict the lessons you learned yesterday.

When life gives you lemons....they could really be oranges.

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

Social psychologists argue that who we are at any one time depends mostly on the context in which we find ourselves. But who creates the context? The more mindful we are, the more we can create the contexts we are in. When we create the context, we are more likely to be authentic. Mindfulness lets us see things in a new light and believe in the possibility of change.

Changing of contexts, as we've seen in earlier chapters, generates imagination and creativity as well as new energy.

Rarely will we be able to make it just as we thought it would be. But by struggling to do so, we often miss what it is—or could have been—if we had just left it alone, without trying to fix our mistakes, and went somewhere new and off plan.

I am, instead, suggesting that we let rules and routines guide our behavior but question them as we find ourselves in new and different contexts.

Put a frog into a pot of water and gradually turn up the heat. The frog will keep adjusting to the increasing temperature until, finally, it dies. Put a frog into a pot of boiling water, though, and the frog will immediately try to jump out of the pot. We too notice the difference when things change drastically.

The Medusa and the Snail,

Working within the constraints of a problem is part of the fun and challenge of design.

It was his way of gaining some control when life got stormy. He couldn't will the rain clouds from the horizon, but he could control how he would react to them.

Airtight allegiance to place could make you a loser, left behind by the great sweep of a monochromatic, generalist world.

It's alarming how quickly people adjust to adventures when they are in one. You really have to work at being astonished by life.

Then Lucia said, "So what do we do now?" "Nothing," Otto said. "Things will go on as just they always have.

Madeline, my wife, never used to wear a watch. She does now, I am told. For a long time, in a very inexact way, I had kept time for her. There was the time before we were married and the time after. There was the time before I was hospitalised and the time after. There was the time she needed me and the time after. And there is now.

I thought I was going to be killed. The casualties were so heavy, it was just a given. I learned to take each day, each mission, as it came. That's an attitude I've carried into my professional life. I take each case, each job, as it comes.

Minds, unlike brains, are not entirely given at birth. Minds are also forms of cultural achievement.

I found another girl to pose for Myrto and then I didn't think about Rafaela much, not until a spring day years later. Or rather, I thought about her with an occasional, impersonal pang. Have you ever had a favorite cafe close? It was like that.