Mutation Quotes

“I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.”
― Timothy Leary

“You can't stop a soldier from being frightened but you can give him motivation to help him overcome that fear. I have no such motivation. I can't have. I'm a witcher: an artificially created mutant. I kill monsters for money. I defend children when their parents pay me to. If Nilfgaardian parents pay me, I'll defend Nilfgaardian children. And even if the world lies in ruin - which does not seem likely to me - I'll carry on killing monsters in the ruins of this world until some monster kills me. That is my fate, my reason, my life and my attitude to the world. And it is not what I chose. It was chosen for me.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Krew elfów

“In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Real arms races are run by highly intelligent, bespectacled engineers in glass offices thoughtfully designing shiny weapons on modern computers. But there's no thinking in the mud and cold of nature's trenches. At best, weapons thrown together amidst the explosions and confusion of smoky battlefields are tiny variations on old ones, held together by chewing gum. If they don't work, then something else is thrown at the enemy, including the kitchen sink - there's nothing "progressive" about that. At its usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition. If the enemy can be stopped or slowed by burning your own bridges and bombing your own radio towers and oil refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench warfare does not lead to progress - it leads back to the Stone Age.”
― Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism

“How is it that you keep mutating and can still be the same virus?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.”
― Edward Tatum

“Lewis's mutation was like the weather; they could prepare, but they could not control a thing.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“Nature had been fucked with. And Mother was pissed.”... Mother Nature was funny that way. Complex. Unpredictable.
And unforgiving as hell if you fucked around with her.”
― Chuck Grossartm

“Duh du jour.”
― Roland Smith, Cryptid Hunters Series

“But what *is* "natural"? I wonder. On one hand: variation, mutation, change, inconstancy, divisibility, flux. And on the other: constancy, permanence, indivisibility, fidelity. Bhed. Abhed. It should hardly surprise us that DNA, the molecule of contradictions, encodes an organism of contradictions. We seek constancy in heredity—and find its opposite: variation. Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our genome has negotiated a fragile balance between counterpoised forces, pairing strand with opposing strand, mixing past and future, pitting memory against desire. It is the most human of all things that we possess. Its stewardship may be the ultimate test of knowledge and discernment for our species. ”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“We’ve now become the spectators of our own mutation.
We may not die human anymore.
But what makes us human?”
― Natasha Tsakos

“La porte s’est ouverte tout de suite et est allée co - gner contre le mur. J’ai perçu un claquement, comme le bruit d’une paume ouverte rencontrant une eau boueuse, et la masse qui ne pouvait pas me ressembler s’est affaissée sur mon abdomen en même temps que l’humeur visqueuse m’entraînait à deux doigts de l’asphyxie. Puis un bruit sec a chassé la chose gisant en travers de moi, et celle-ci a atterri mollement au pied d’un paravent qui divisait mon appartement. Jan s’est éloigné du lit pour pousser du pied la masse presque humanoïde et a hoché la tête. J’ai eu une quinte de toux et j’ai recraché une substance peu ragoûtante. Il est venu près de moi, a détaché l’un de mes poignets pour que je m’appuie contre lui et il m’a frotté le dos en essuyant mon menton avec un coin de la couverture. Il n’a pas eu de mouvement de recul devant le bouillon visqueux qui se collait à lui. Je n’ai pas crié « Mon héros ! », mais, abandonnant tout orgueil, je me suis laissée aller dans ses bras à ma terreur rétrospective. « Nous te guérirons, disait-il, nous trouverons un moyen de venir à bout du LX-200. Fais-moi confiance, je ne suis pas ton ennemi. »”
― Sylvie Bérard, La saga d'Illyge

“We are all mutants with ticking time bombs hidden inside”
― Lone Frank, My Beautiful Genome: Exposing Our Genetic Future, One Quirk at a Time

“There were five of them, and four had traded their eyes for green-gold wasps that curled into their sockets and compounded their vision. Claws graced their hands like sharp commas. Scales at their throats burned red when they breathed. One wing sighed bellows-like out of the naked back of the shortest, the one who still had slate-gray human eyes. After a while, I'd wished he had wasps instead.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“if ideas were viruses, then, like any virus, they would mutate rapidly and often arbitrarily, with only the fitter ideas spreading and continuing their lineage. We simply do not see this with any sort of knowledge.”
― Andrew T Kelly, The Bifrost and The Ark: Examining the Cult and Religion of New Atheism

“Dans la mesure où des êtres vivants s'écartent du type spécifique, sont-ils des anormaux mettant la forme spécifique en péril, ou bien des inventeurs sur la voie de formes nouvelles ?”
― Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological

“Understand the environment to understand humans.”
― Steven Magee

“Actually most radiation just kills you. You need a balanced Eastman-Laird reaction to get possible mutational effects.”
― Andrew Seiple, Seed

“Death will continue to evolve in ways that replicate the patterns of our life.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“If life had rejected mutation 3 billion years ago, we'd still be crawling around as single cell organism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans

“Grief is a form of growth that in gradual excess becomes graphic and grotesque.”
― Criss Jami

“He’ll put a hole in your belly and fuck the wound while you’re still alive. We don’t call him the Animal for nothing.”
― J.F. Gonzalez, Survivor