Quotes about Adaptation

The road we have taken to this point has not been easy. But then again the road to change never is.

It was as if, because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone.

Justifying the past mattered less than planning what to do next.

History travels not only forwards; history can travel backwards, history can travel sideways.

I reminded myself that every president felt saddled with the previous administration's choices and mistakes, that 90 percent of the job was navigating inherited problems and unanticipated crises. Only if you did that well enough, with discipline and purpose, did you get a real shot at shaping the future.

I hold on to my adopted shore, chanting private vows: wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need. Let me be a good animal today. Let me dance in the waves of my private tide, the habits of survival and love.

Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Matthew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonsense to us now. All that foot washing, for example. Was it really for God's glory or just to keep the sand out of the house?

You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back.

People change, she said. Not everything stays with you all your life.

There is nothing boring about the prospect of extinction.

That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

Whole phases of her children's lives, these passions that had seemed to be their purest marrow, had faded away one after another. And character persisted.