Quotes About Evolution

How often had life begun on Earth, and been scalded from its face, and formed again?

But if he's right, then… Harvey glanced at the globe he had brought from his office. He had outlined circles in Magic Marker: the Sea of Japan, the Bay of Bengal, the arc of islands that mark the Indies Sea, a double circle within the Gulf of Mexico. If an asteroid strike had made any one of those, the oceans would have boiled, all life would have been cremated. How often had life begun on Earth, and been scalded from its face, and formed again?

brachiating hominids.

Nothing lasts. You can't do any one thing for two hundred years. A marriage, a career, a hobby—they're good for twenty years, and maybe you go through a phase more than once. I did some experimental medicine. I wrote a big chunk of that documentary on the Trinoc culture that won a—

It—it ought to be pretty well closed off for an intelligent species, she said. Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.

When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.

Every ending is an opportunity for something better.

that real love comes over time, once that initial draw you're talking about takes on a different form. When you get to understand there is something more concrete between you. Something that is worth preserving...

That was what I feared most: that he just wasn't excited about us anymore—that something between us had altered irreversibly. And afterward, I started seeing the evidence everywhere: in the way he didn't sleep facing me anymore, or the way he'd stopped asking me the questions he used to need to know the answers to, the way he stopped needing to tell me things in order for them to count.

I'd been wrong about the ways we move past the versions of ourselves that no longer fit. I'd thought it involved running, as far and as fast as your feet could carry you, from your former selves. I didn't understand that was the surest way to wind up exactly where you started. 44 In the morning, I looked out the window, feeling foggy and damp, like I'd had a bottle of wine the night before.

People always say that things come full circle, but I think that's not accurate. I think they just come very close. You find yourself almost back where you started, but you've moved slightly. Like evidence of the time that has passed, of the things that have happened.

The calm continueth not long without a storm," he said. "You lost me there." "The origin of the expression, the calm before the storm," he said. "From an unknown source in the sixteenth century. But it started a little different than how it's evolved. I like it more. The original idea that the calm can't last, not if you're really living. If you're living fully, the storm's coming to get you.

Maybe that's the way everything changes. Just when you finally believe that anything is stable, and will stay the same.

him," he says. "Though I remember him having longer hair. And being much heavier. He looks quite different." "But not entirely?

The last time always seems sad, but it isn't really. The end of one thing is only the beginning of another.

Bad taste never dies. It just keeps evolving.

He was tired of everyone believing they knew everything there was to know about him, as if a person never grew, a person never changed, a person was born a weird and dreamy little kid with too-red lips and stayed that way forever just to keep things simple for everyone else.

No self-respecting gastronome was going to look back on the 1950s with anything except pity. •

The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different, the streets were called Closes, the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the human beings were the same as they always had been.

He'd changed in the ten years since he'd been gone.He'd grown taller certainly, and his body was thick with muscle, but his white blond hair was now cut close to the skull, and he had tattoos peeking out from both the collar and the cuffs of his white shirt.

Giving up something that no longer serves a purpose, or protects you, or helps you, isn't giving up at all, it's growing up.

I have lived for over three hundred years. In that time, the ideal of beauty has changed many times. Large breasts, small, thin, curved, tall, short, they have all been the height of beauty at one time or another. But in all that time, ma petite, I have never desired anyone the way I desire you. - Jean-Claude

Once upon a time wasn't as long ago as it used to be.

We all build upon our ruins.