Mutated Quotes

The secret to battling cancer, then, is to find means to prevent these mutations from occurring in susceptible cells, or to find means to eliminate the mutated cells without compromising normal growth. The conciseness of that statement belies the enormity of the task. Malignant growth and normal growth are so genetically intertwined that unbraiding the two might be one of the most significant scientific challenges faced by our species. Cancer is built into our genomes: the genes that unmoor normal cell division are not foreign to our bodies, but rather mutated, distorted versions of the very genes that perform vital cellular functions. And cancer is imprinted in our society: as we extend our life span as a species, we inevitably unleash malignant growth (mutations in cancer genes accumulate with aging; cancer is thus intrinsically related to age). If we seek immortality, then so, too, in a rather perverse sense, does the cancer cell. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

If one of the people who'd gone Cold drank human blood, the infection mutated. It killed the host and then raised them back up again, Colder than before. Cold through and through, forever and ever. ~ Holly Black

From around the corner's edge a grotesque light was trickling out, the first intimations of an ominous sunrise over a dark horizon. I dimly recognized this colored light, though not from my waking memory. It grew more intense, now pouring out in weird streams from beyond the solid margin of the building. And the more intense it grew, the more clearly I could hear the screaming voice that had called out to me in a dream. I shouted his name, but the swelling colored brightness was a field of fear which kept me from making any move toward it. It was no amalgam of colors comparable to anything in mortal experience. It was as if all natural colors had been mutated into a painfully lush iridescence by some prism fantastically corrupted in its form; it was a rainbow staining the sky after a poison deluge; it was an aurora painting the darkness with a blaze of insanity, a blaze that did not burn vigorously but shimmered with an insect-jeweled frailness. And, in actuality, it was nothing like these color-filled effusions, which are merely a feeble means of partially fixing a reality uncommunicable to those not initiated to it, a necessary resorting to the makeshift gibberish of the mystic isolated by his experience and left without a language to describe it.

("The Dreaming In Nortown") ~ Thomas Ligotti

Anton Brookes: I think I was within my right to accuse him of selling out a little bit, if you think about what Nirvana was supposed to be about and what they stood for; they did antirape benefits for Bosnia and stuff like that. Nirvana were supposedly right-on, weren't they? They were the voice of a generation, the conscience of a generation. And for all intents and purposes, Kurt mutated into everything he was against. He became your attitudinal rock star, with the tantrums and the plush hotels and everything. And then, for all intents and purposes, Kurt was sucking corporation cock. ~ Mark Yarm

If you take 100 breast-cancer samples, 100 types of cancer have 100 different hallmarks of mutated genes. You could be nihilistic and say, 'Oh, God, we'll never be able to tackle this!' But there are deep, systematic, organizational principles at work in all that diversity. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Where did secular liberalism go wrong?

It has been undone by its own ideas. The first idea is that matters of conscience - religion, ethics, and values - are private matters. The privatizing of conscience started with two important principles: religion should be separated from the state and people should not be forced to believe one way or the other. But it went further to say that belief has no place in the public sphere. Conscience belongs in homes and houses of worship, not in the marketplace. By making conscience private, secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics. But of course they couldn't, since freedom of belief means believers are free to speak their minds in public.

Instead, secularism imposed a gag order on itself. Because "private" is equated with "personal" and "subjective," questions of conscience were placed out of bounds of serious critical evaluation.

…

… The mistake lies in thinking that because conscience is free from coercion, it must be free from criticism, reason, truth, or independent, objective standards of right and wrong. The indispensable principle of freedom of belief has mutated into an unthinking assumption that matters of belief are immune to critical public inquiry and shared evaluative norms. ~ Austin Dacey

She wanted to read things -- could not resist wanting to read things -- and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexive habits baffled the girl, for she knew herself to be fantastically stupid about many things. Wasn't it possible that what others mistook as intelligence might in fact be only a sort of mutation of the will? She could sit in one place longer than other children be bored for hours without complaint, and was completely devoted to filling in every last corner of the coloring books Augustus Blake sometimes brought home. She could not help her mutated will -- no more than she could help the shape of her feet or the street on which she was born. She was unable to glean real satisfaction from accidents. In the child's mind a breach now appeared: between what she believed she knew of herself, essentially, and her essence as others seemed to understand it. She began to exist for other people, and if ever asked a question to which she did not know the answer she was wont to fold her arms across her body and look upward. As if the question itself were to obvious to truly concern her. ~ Zadie Smith

Ours is certainly not an old culture. Yet in recent decades we've used more energy, destroyed more soil, created more pathogenicity (temporarily stopped some too, for sure), mutated more bacteria, and dumped more toxicity on the planet than all the cultures before us-combined. I love the United States, but I am not blind to the wrongs. I have no desire to live anywhere else, but that doesn't mean I think everything we're doing should be done or can be maintained. ~ Joel Salatin

I really felt amazing overall
other than a few minutes ago in the shower. Pushing the thought from my mind, I focused on the positives. My senses were heightened now, like I'd been bitten by Peter Parker's radioactive spider.
Only the guy who bit me was a mutated green beret. And instead of making me into a superhero, he'd doomed me to die of a brain hemorrhage. ~ Lisa Kessler

They imbibed. It never went far, not among so many, but their naturally frantic edge amplified it, whatever the euphoric, pushed it until giddiness mutated into a sort of epiphany – a pack ritual. And rituals have power. ~ Robert Dunbar

An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated
nearly
into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul. ~ Salman Rushdie

Ebola...is manufactured and purposefully mutated to cause the most harm possible... (p. 105) ~ Julie Rowe

I think the Stealth and Evasion lesson was the strangest,' Lucy said. 'Not so much the lesson as the teacher actually. I mean . . . Ms Leon. She's . . . well . . .'

'A cat?' Otto offered with a cheery smile.

'Yeah . . . yeah, that's really the only way of putting it,' Lucy said, sounding slightly bewildered.

'Don't worry, you get used to it,' Shelby said. 'Besides, it's only when the giant mutated flesh-eating plants and android ninjas are around that things really get weird.'

Lucy started to laugh but stopped when she saw the expression on the other students' faces.

'That was a joke, right?' Lucy asked. ~ Mark Walden

They're not 'fellas.' They're not anywhere near human. They're nothing but leaking sacks of mutated maggots, just like you." Lookswise, he and the other angels I'd seen were closer to living Adonises, complete with god-like faces and presence. But inside, they were maggots for sure. ~ Susan Ee

Mishmar. Your father's hellish prison he cobbled together from the remains of office buildings from Omaha, which he destroyed. The Mishmar that's stuffed to the brink with mutated vampires. That Mishmar." "Yes." "You ~ Ilona Andrews

Did you just seriously ask me if the Northern Lights mutated my sperm? ~ Eve Langlais

But what the world remembered was her beauty. She was not just beautiful like some people think of beautiful, for her beauty was not just for herself. It was the kind of beauty that didn't kill or isolate. She made everything and everyone that saw her or that she saw, touched or walked over want to live a little longer just from the hope of seeing her again. The world flowered and grew wherever she passed. When she brushed by them, wild orchids and lilies mutated into forms and colors never seen before. Even rocks would sparkle, split and crumble into smaller chunks, then grow their ecstatic fragments back into cliffs, defying time and geology, and all because they felt her sueded feet step upon them. ~ Martin Prechtel

Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic. ~ David Foster Wallace

Jobs was a strong-willed, elitist artist who didn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers. To him it would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song. ~ Walter Isaacson

They were a form of mutated twinning, joined at the base of the skull so that a single cephalic structure served both separate bodies. Evidently the personality George inhabited one hemisphere of the brain, made use of one eye: the right, as he recalled. And the personality Walt existed on the other side, distinct with its own idiosyncrasies, views and drives - and its own eye from which to view the outside universe. ~ Philip K. Dick

Ah, we're the infection, Sma.' He turned and sat down on the steps, looking back towards the city and the sea. 'We're the ones who're different, we're the self-mutilated, the self-mutated. This is the mainstream; we're just like very smart kids; infants with a brilliant construction kit. They're real because they live the way they have to. We aren't because we live the way we want to. ~ Iain M. Banks

So, it's the zombie apocalypse, right? Zombies are coming out of the ass, running amuck through buildings and streets. You've already almost died three times by this point and have been mutated by the T virus twice, which appears to be painful. Would you take time in your obviously hectic daily routine to do your hair and put makeup on? ~ J. Lynn

Let the chromosomes be represented by the keyboard of a grand piano-a very grand piano with thousands of keys. Then each key will be a gene. Every cell in the body carries a microscopic but complete keyboard in its nucleus. But each specialised cell is only permitted to sound one chord, according to its specialty-the rest of its genetic keyboard has been inactivated by scotch tape. The fertilised egg, and the first few generations of its daughter cells, had the complete keyboard at their disposal. But succesive generations have, at each 'point of no return', larger and larger areas of it covered by scotch tape. In the end, a muscle cell can only do one thing: contract-strike a single chord.

The scotch tape is known in the language of genetics as the 'repressor'. The agent which strikes the key and activates the gene is an 'inducer'. A mutated gene is a key which has gone out of tune. When quite a lot of key have gone quite a lot out of tune, the result, we were asked to believe, was a much improved, wonderful new melody- a reptile transformed into a bird, or a monkey into a man. It seems that at some point the theory must have gone wrong.

The point where it went wrong was the atomistic concept of the gene. ~ Arthur Koestler

I've been very lucky at what's happened in my career to date, but playing something as far from me as possible is an ambition of mine - anything from a mutated baddy in a comic book action thriller, to a detective. If anything, I'd like Gary Oldman's career: he's the perfect example of it. I've love to have a really broad sweep of characters - to be able to do something edgy, surprising and unfashionable. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch

Why are we seeing George Bush on TV every two hours for nine or ten days at a time, like some kind of mutated Mr. Rogers clone? Something is dangerously wrong in any country where a monumentally-failed backwoods politician can scare our national TV networks so totally that they will give him anything he wants. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

But it's not just me, you know. The whole world's sad," I said. "It's like a virus. It's going to end badly. Glaciers melting, ozone depleted. Terrorists blowing up buildings, nuclear rods infecting the aqueducts. Influenza hopping from the pigeons to the humans, killing millions. Billions. People rotting in the street. The sun bursting open, shattering us eight minutes later. If not that, starvation. Cannibalism. Freakish mutated babies with eyeballs in their navels. It's a terrible place to bring a child into," I said. "This world. It is terrible. Just terrible." I ~ Lauren Groff

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was. ~ Donald Kingsbury

There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn't they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it's the same old lesson: everything in this life - I repeat, everything - is more trouble than it's worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There's a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness. ~ Thomas Ligotti

We are talking about mutated women, the result of cruel genetic experiments performed by fashion designers so lacking in any sense of human decency that they think nothing of putting their initials on your eyeglass lenses. The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates. If a normal woman puts on clothing designed for these unfortunate people, she is quite naturally going to look like Revenge of the Pork Person. ~ Dave Barry

I don't know what to . . . to think." There was a horrifying burn of tears crawling up my throat.

"This is all overwhelming for you, I imagine. The whole world as you know it is on the brink of great change, and you're here and don't even know my name." The man smiled so broadly, I wondered if it hurt. "You can call me Rolland." Then he extended a hand.

My gaze dropped to it and I made no attempt to take it.

Rolland chuckled as he turned and strolled back to the desk. "So, you're a hybrid? Mutated and linked to him on such an intense level that if one of you dies, so does the other?"

His question caught me off guard, but I kept quiet.

He sat on the edge of the desk. "You're actually the first hybrid I've seen."

"She really isn't anything special." The redhead sneered. "Frankly, she's rather filthy, like an unclean animal."

As stupid as it was, my cheeks heated, because I was filthy, and Daemon had just physically removed me from him. My pride - my everything - was officially wounded.

Rolland chuckled. "She's had a rough day, Sadi."

At her name, every muscle in my body locked up, and my gaze swung back to her. That was Sadi? The one Dee said was trying to molest Daemon - my Daemon? Anger punched through the confusion and hurt. Of course it would have to be a freaking walking and talking model and not a hag.

"Rough day or not, I can't imagine she cleans up well." Sadi l ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

The problem is this: when we separate Jesus from his ideas for an alternative social structure, we inevitably succumb to the temptation to harness Jesus to our ideas - thus conferring upon our human political ideas an assumed divine endorsement. With little awareness of what we are doing, we find ourselves in collusion with the principalities and powers to keep the world in lockstep with the ancient choreography of violence, war, and death. We do this mostly unconsciously, but we do it. I've done it. And the result is that we reduce Jesus to being the Savior who guarantees our reservation in heaven while using him to endorse our own ideas about how to run the world. This feeds into a nationalized narrative of the gospel and leads to a state-owned Jesus. Thus, our understanding of Christ has mutated from Roman Jesus to Byzantine Jesus to German Jesus to American Jesus, etc. ~ Brian Zahnd

( ... ) photography opened up quite a little Pandora's box, kiddies. ( ... ) Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence - once they became an option - they mutated ... into a form of expression. And Art for its own sake, God help us, was born. ~ Chip Kidd

Cumbia is a beautiful rhythm. It's a music that has indigenous, African and European components. It's played in all of America - from Argentina to the U.S. It has mutated and been nurtured by everyone who comes across it. ~ Juan Campodonico

The mutated Marfan gene creates a defective version of fibrillin, a protein that provides structural support for soft tissues like blood vessels. Marfan victims often die young, in fact, after their aortas grow threadbare and rupture. ~ Sam Kean

Before I met Oscar, I was fine. But then I met him, and I knew him, and I loved him, and he died, and after that, in an Oscarless world, I couldn't go back to the way I was before I knew him, because I wasn't the same person anymore. He mutated me. ~ Charles Baxter

Pong had mutated into large stand-up Sega consoles by '82 and here was some extra revenue the guys were well up for. So the space on the left of the entrance was to be the games room. Until two weeks to opening.
"Where's the cloakroom?"
"The what?"
"The cloakroom, the fucking cloakroom."
"What's your problem?"
"We don't have a cloakroom. We have special polished South African granite bar tops that we haven't told Erasmus about 'cause he has a thing about apartheid, we have a balcony balustrade made of shaped QE-fucking-2 mahogany, but we seem to have built an entire club without a cloakroom."
"Fuck."
Hence you did not pass the games room but the cloakroom, the only cloakroom in the Manchester with forty-two power points. if you ever wanted to do a bit of ironing, these people were there for you. ~ Tony Wilson

Morpheus laughs. " 'Mutated.' The word you're looking for is evolved , luv. He has shed his monkey mortal state and donned the robes of netherling immortality. That's a step up, not a step down." ~ A.G. Howard

It was no amalgam of colors comparable to anything in mortal existence. It was as if all natural colors had been mutated into a painfully lush iridescence by some prism fantastically corrupted in its form; it was a rainbow staining the sky after a poison deluge; it was an aurora painting the darkness with a blaze of insanity, a blaze that did not burn vigorously but shimmered with an insect-jeweled frailness. ~ Thomas Ligotti

The Iraqi Baath Socialist Party was modelled in large part on admiration for European National Socialist and Fascist movements, hoped to emulate them especially in their nationalism against the West. But mutated by Saddam Hussein it became also one that very, very much admired, and grew a special moustache in admiration of the work of Yosif Vissarionovitch Dzugashvili, the great Georgian known to us historically as Stalin. So you had him in modern Iraq, a regime in our own time, that was openly, directly modelled upon the two most extreme examples of European totalitarianism. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does James Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain. ~ Terry Pratchett

I found it hard to imagine that Arthur had ever had moral scruples and something like a conscience, but Henry and Grayson also kept assuring me that their former best friend had once been a really nice guy. Before he fell hopelessly in love with Anabel and then realized that he had been exploited, manipulated, and misused for her purposes. Where would we be if everyone who suffered a bitter disappointment automatically mutated into a criminal? ~ Kerstin Gier

A beginning is a very delicate time. Know then, that is is the year 10191. The known universe is ruled by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam the Fourth, my father. In this time, the most precious substance in the universe is the spice Melange. The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. A product of the Spive, the red Sapho juice, stains the lips of the Mentats but allows them to be human computers, as thinking machines have been outlawed. The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its navigators, who the spice has mutated over 4000 years, use the orange spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space. That is, travel to any part of the universe without moving. Because the Guild controls all interplanetary travel, they are the highest power in the Universe. The Spice also plays a very secret role in the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, of which I am a part. The sisterhood has been interfering with the marriages, and the children thereof, of the great Houses of the Universe, cleverly intermixing one bloodline with another to form the Kwisatz Haderach, a super being. They plan to control this super being and use his powers for their own selfish purposes. The breeding plan has been carried out in a strict manner for 90 generations. The goal of the super being is in sight. But now, so close to the prize, a Bene Gesserit woman, Jessica, the bound concubine of Duke Leto Atreides, who has been ordered to bear only daughters, has given birth to a son. Oh, yes. I ~ Frank Herbert

Precision medicine is diving into the DNA with a knowledge that everybody's tumor has a unique genetic profile and you want to be able to identify that specific piece of DNA that has become mutated and that is driving cancer growth. ~ Laurie Glimcher