Monkey Grip Quotes

How do you know, when you think blue — when you say blue — that you are talking about the same blue as anyone else? You cannot get a grip on blue. Blue is the sky, the sea, a god’s eye, a devil’s tail, a birth, a strangulation, a virgin’s cloak, a monkey’s ass. It’s a butterfly, a bird, a spicy joke, the saddest song, the brightest day. Blue is sly, slick, it slides into the room sideways, a slippery trickster. This is a story about the color blue, and like blue, there’s nothing true about it. Blue is beauty, not truth. ‘True blue’ is a ruse, a rhyme; it’s there, then it’s not. Blue is a deeply sneaky color.

My friend Adele describes fundamentalism as holding so tightly to your beliefs that your fingernails leave imprints on the palm of your hand... I think she's right. I was a fundamentalist not because of the beliefs I held but because of how I held them: with a death grip. It would take God himself to finally pry them out of my hands. (p.17-18)

It was early summer. And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.

I saw the bumpy shape of my skull, I saw myself shorn and revealed. I wandered in a dream around the city, glimpsing in shop windows a strange creature with my face.

...as if, one lover gone, I was opening up for an immediate replacement. Smack habit, love habit - what's the difference? They can both kill you. For the bus journey I fell in love with a woman who smiled at me. The motion of the bus made her thick mop of fair curls tremble. We talked about desperados. 'I am fatally attracted to them', I said. 'In fact, I probably am one'.

I remembered only the good and loveable things about him, not the wretchedness he caused me, and the dope, and the resentments and silence and the half-crazy outbursts. I remembered his smell and the colour of his eyes and his head thrown back to laugh; these things were a second away, in time, but the others I dredged up dutifully, knowing that I must, for the sake of truth and sanity, try to keep a balance.

I was a fundamentalist because my security and self-worth and sense of purpose in life were all wrapped up in getting God right — in believing the right things about him, saying the right things about him, and convincing others to embrace the right things about him too. ... I was a fundamentalist not because of the beliefs I held but because of how I held them: with a death grip.

Petri. My monkey. They boiled him." Her voice sounded strange, even to her own ears. She'd been quiet in the town car Luke had summoned, but once it had dropped them off a block from his apartment , she couldn't seem to stop talking. Luke's grip tightened on her wrist at the words. "Yes. The dead monkey is gone, and we're very sad. I got it the first ten fucking times you mentioned it." He snapped

I’ve seen the way she comes on to him—I just can’t stand it. You know—what really shits me is how you spend years working on yourself to get rid of all that stupid eyelash-fluttering and giggling, and then just when you think you’re getting somewhere, you find out that guys still like women who do that sort of thing. I watch ‘em fall for it, every time.

I realised I had a stream of thoughts about him which ran for the most part below conscious level. I noticed jets spurting up from this stream: comparisons with other relationships I knew of which had weathered massive changes and shifts of balance; small crumbs of hope he would find he missed the familiarity of my company, or that his gestures of comfort meant more than a gentle goodbye. I grieved for these hopes, and their hopelessness.

Remember the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey? Bunch of monkeys collecting bones. What‘s that got to do with space? They don‘t even have lasers! Cut that shit. And what about Citizen Kane? If they‘d wanted to gross some dollar, they should‘ve called it Dude, Where‘s My Sled?

When he came down, he was slower, and clutching something his hand. He leapt down the last 5 feet or so and came over to me, uncurling his fingers. In his palm was something trembling and silky and the bright, delicious pale gold of apples; in the gloom of the jungle it looked like light itself. Uva nudged the thing with a finger and it turned over, and I could see it was a monkey of some sort, though no monkey I had ever seen before; it was only a few inches larger than one of the mice I had once been tasked with killing, and his face was a wrinkled black heart, its features pinched together but its eyes large and as blankly blue as a blind kitten's. It had tiny, perfectly formed hands, one of which was gripping its tail, which it had wrapped around itself and which was flamboyantly furred, its hair hanging like a fringe.

A monkey can run amazingly fast, it can jump long distances, and it uses its tail as a gripper or a hook. It also has a mind. Nancy thought, An angry monkey is like a flying pit bull terrier with five prehensile limbs—these critters can do a job on you. A monkey directs its attacks toward the face and head. It will grab you by the head, using all four limbs, and then it will wrap its tail around your neck to get a good grip, and it will make slashing attacks all over your face with its teeth, aiming especially for the eyes. This is not a good situation if the monkey happens to be infected with Ebola virus.

Hateful and spineless, raped and robbed, mangled and witless, they were as good as we are, you can say that again! We never change. Neither our socks nor our masters nor our opinions, or we're so slow about it that it's no use. We were born loyal, and that's what killed us! Soldiers free of charge, heroes for everyone else, talking monkeys, tortured words, we are the minions of King Misery. He's our lord and master! When we misbehave, he tightens his grip ... his fingers are around our neck, that makes it hard to talk, got to be careful if we want to eat ... For nothing at all he'll choke you . . . It's not a life . . .

She hoots like a monkey and pulls me back onto a shelf in the tub. I fall between her legs, I fall on top of her, we sink … and then we’re twirling, spinning in the water, me on top, then her, then me, and giggling, and making bird cries. Steam envelops us, cloaks us; light sparkles on the agitated water; and we keep spinning, so that at some point I’m not sure which hands are mine, which legs. We aren’t kissing. This game is far less serious, more playful, free-style, but we’re gripping each other, trying not to let the other’s slippery body go, and our knees bump, our tummies slap, our hips slide back and forth. Various submerged softnesses on Clementine’s body are delivering crucial information to mine, information I store away but won’t understand until years later. How long do we spin? I have no idea. But at ,some point we get tired. Clementine beaches on the shelf, with me on top.

A monkey directs its attacks toward the face and head. It will grab you by the head, using all four limbs, and then it will wrap its tail around your neck to get a good grip, and it will make slashing attacks all over your face with its teeth, aiming especially for the eyes. This is not a good situation if the monkey happens to be infected with Ebola virus.

His fingers cupped my face, cradling my cheek and jaw as if I was made of glass. I found a handful of his soft hair and wound my fingers into it, while curling my other hand into the shoulder of his leather coat. My heart hadn’t even stopped thundering from the Foul Woman’s presence. Now it was thrumming against my ribs again, too fast to count the beats. I did something I’d always secretly wanted to and bit down, very gently, on his beautiful bottom lip. Shinobu’s breath shivered into my mouth, and he pulled me closer.   I was taller now, but not tall enough. Tiptoes didn’t bring me where I wanted to be either. I jumped and hauled myself up the steel pillar of his body, wrapping one leg around his hip. The big, warm hand on my waist slid slowly down the thin fabric of my trousers to cup my thigh, supporting my weight. His other hand was clenched in my hair. A wave of almost painful excitement and yearning crashed through me, and sent me into a full-body shudder that I had no chance of hiding. A tiny moan popped from my lips straight into his.   “Mio. Oh, Mio…” His shaking voice echoed in my ears, mixing with words in Japanese. I recognized some of them. My beloved. My Mio. He pressed his mouth to my eyelid, my cheek, the edge of my jaw, the skin beneath my ear.   There was a loud tearing noise. We both froze.   Abruptly I was aware of the wall against my back, and the tremble in my thigh from hanging onto him like a demented spider monkey. I swallowed and blinked as Shinobu eased back, letting my feet drop to the pavement again. Our eyes met.   “What just…?” I asked.   He cleared his throat. “I think – my shirt.”   I looked down and saw that at some point I’d traded my grip on his hair for a handful of the T-shirt and jumper under his jacket. My fingers had gone straight through the thin wool and made a nice tear in the cotton beneath that too.   “Darn super-strength,” I muttered.   Shinobu’s lip twitched up at the corner again. I snatched my hand away from his ruined clothes and clapped it over his mouth. “No laughing at me,” I said, only half joking. “Not at a moment like this. Romance will die forever and it’ll be your fault.” He peeled my hand off and pressed a kiss to my palm. “Where are we now? What is this place?” “Um … Remnant Street, I think.”   “No. From now on it will be Paradise Street. Heaven Road. Happiness Avenue.”   “You big cheese-ball…” I muttered, putting my arms around his waist and hugging him tightly.   “What?”   “Never mind!” I grumped, then sighed. “I wish we could stay on Happiness Avenue a bit longer…”   “But we can’t,” he finished. “It is all right. I promise we will come back whenever you want.

New wisdom is the wisdom that whispers to us to pursue detachment. It is the wisdom that, steady as breath work, releases us from our monkey-mind grip on exactly how life needs to look and sound. We don’t even have to obsess about how long an idea will be relevant, trusting the universe that when the idea’s time has expired an even more useful one will appear to replace it.

Francis stayed with me and was patiently kind to me; but when we were fucking I began to cry again out of weakness and fear that he was fucking me, as a man does to a woman or out of fear that I liked it. I couldn’t find his mind, or his heart; he was away in his own travelling.

I sat down opposite him. He looked up, straight into my eyes as he does, and smiled at me. At that moment, we were both a hundred years old and we had known each other for ever.

I thought about the patterns I make in my life: loving the wrong person, loving not enough and too much and too long.

He takes my hand and grips it tightly. He holds it so long that our palms get sweaty and stick together. I extricate mine and pull back. “Sometimes I feel like I can’t get close enough to you,” he says. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking toward where Hayley is climbing on the monkey bars. I scratch my head. “I don’t think we can get much closer than we were last night.” He shakes his head. “Sex is easy. It’s the rest of it that’s difficult.” I look at his profile because he’s still not looking at me. I pretend to make light of his comment and scoff. “I wouldn’t say that I made sex easy.” His gaze suddenly jerks to mine. “We didn’t have sex.” I hold up one finger and grin. “I distinctly remember—” But he cuts me off. “I remember it, too. I remember telling you that I loved you and you telling me you felt the same way. And we made mad, passionate love. Crazy good love like I have never had before. And then we did it again. And then we pulled my daughter into bed with us and that was the best fucking part about the whole thing.” He turns to face me. “I want a family, Friday. Not just a fuck. Tail is easy to come by. You, on the other hand…” He lets his voice trail off. “You’re one of a fucking kind, and I want you to be mine so badly I can taste it. And I’ll still be tasting it next week, next year, and every day following that.” “I’m with you,” I say hesitantly. I don’t know how much more of a commitment I can offer him. I’ve already offered more than I ever thought I would be able to offer anyone. He leans over and hovers over my lips. “I love you so fucking much,” he says. “Just remember that.” He stares into my eyes for a minute, and then he goes to Hayley and races her to the sliding board.

But I’ve been reading A Very Easy Death, about Simone de Beauvoir’s mother dying of cancer – it’s just brilliant. It really helped me.’ She

sometimes, we touch each other. No one else gets that close to me. He behaves