“Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist
Source: The Salmon of Doubt (2002)
Context: My favorite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done. This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.
“Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist
“I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.”
Leonard Cohen book Beautiful Losers
Source: Beautiful Losers
“The only way a no-legged leopard could hurt you is if it fell out of a tree onto your head.”
Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress
Source: My Point... And I Do Have One
Robert M. Sapolsky (1957) American endocrinologist
Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Context: Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words."
You say "Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops."
This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.
Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) King of the Belgians
Source: Leopold II, King of the Belgians in a letter to his minister, Charles Woeste, dated June 9, 1901. https://archive.org/details/TheBelgo-congoleseRoundTable/page/n1/mode/2up
Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist
Source: Learning Strategies and Individual Competence (1972), p. 276.
Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar
Marco's breath scorched my ear. "You're a perfectly respectable dancer."
Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 9
“When a tree is very old, yet still lives, sometimes the limbs are strangely twisted.”
Gene Wolfe book The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories
"The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" (1970), Orbit 7, ed. Damon Knight, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Wolfe Archipelago (1983), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction
Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology
Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s