“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.”

—  Douglas Adams , book The Salmon of Doubt

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.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their ow…" by Douglas Adams?
Douglas Adams photo
Douglas Adams 317
English writer and humorist 1952–2001

Related quotes

Audre Lorde photo

“Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist
Leonard Cohen photo

“I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.”

Leonard Cohen book Beautiful Losers

Source: Beautiful Losers

Ellen DeGeneres photo

“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 photo

“This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.”

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 photo

“Young trees need stakes to support them, but the stakes must be removed once the trees begin to grow, precisely so not to hinder their growth.”

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

“Serialists fall into difficulties if they fail to distinguish the wood from the trees and consequently try to assimilate masses of sparsely related irrelevant information”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: Learning Strategies and Individual Competence (1972), p. 276.

Jonathan Safran Foer photo

“… the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Sylvia Plath photo

“It's a tango." Marco maneuvered me out among the dancers. "I love tangos." "I can't dance." "You don't have to dance. I'll do that dancing." Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, "Pretend you are drowning." I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted against him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, "It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one," and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind. "What did I tell you?”

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

Gene Wolfe photo

“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 photo

“The story of Adam and Eve represents the fruit as producing a psychological transformation. So the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is an abstraction across trees, and it's trying to say: 'Here's something that's common across trees, it's a fruit that's common across trees.' The fruit that's common across trees is something that you might call food, fair enough. But here's something that's even more cool: food that's stable across the entire domain of food, isn't food – it's information. We use the same bloody circuits in our brain to forage for information, that animals use to forage for information. Why is that? Because we figured out knowing where the food is, is more important than having the food… That's why we're information foragers.”

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

Related topics