Monkey King Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Monkey King. Here they are! All 90 of them:

The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.
T.H. White (The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4))
It was just a kiss – " "Yeah, and King Kong was just a monkey.
Linda Howard (After the Night)
All things considered, I'd rather have monkeys," Kishan shouted. I shivered. "Tell you what. We'll rent King Kong and The Birds. Then you can decide." He yelled as he ran from a swooping bird, "Are you asking me on a date? Because if you are, it will definitely give me more incentive to come out of this alive." "Whatever works" "You're on.
Colleen Houck (Tiger's Quest (The Tiger Saga, #2))
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...It's not a life.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)
I never could stomach these nationalists,’ he exclaimed. ‘The destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.
T.H. White (The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4))
It's true," Eliot said. "Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life decisions based on its horoscope in USA Today would be right more often than you. But in this case, yes, you were right. Don't spoil it.
Lev Grossman (The Magician King (The Magicians, #2))
Most politicians lie for the same reason a monkey swings by his tail, which is to say because he can.
Stephen King (The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, #7))
I've set myself to become the King of Pirates...and if I die trying...then at least I tried.
Monkey D. Luffy
All the same, you don’t do it for money, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of the bottom line, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or you’re a monkey. In the end you don’t even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do it because to not do it is suicide.
Stephen King (Skeleton Crew: Stories)
What he really needed was a weapon. A big, threatening, FU kind of weapon that would show everyone the Monkey King meant business.
F.C. Yee (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, #1))
I was having the best dream,” he croaked. “I was flying over a jungle on the back of a dragon and I fell off and tumbled down into the trees… and then I got adopted by a gang of monkeys. They made me their king.
Jessica Townsend (Wundersmith: The Calling of Morrigan Crow (Nevermoor, #2))
I’m an old man trying to give a young daughter advice, and it’s like a monkey trying to teach table manners to a bear.
Stephen King (The Stand)
The destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.
T.H. White (The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4))
Monkey now produced his staff and the two of them did their best to kill each other, like the affectionate in-laws they were.
Wu Cheng'en (Monkey King: Journey to the West)
Little girls are the nicest things that can happen to people. They are born with a bit of angel-shine about them, and though it wears thin sometimes, there is always enough left to lasso your heart—even when they are sitting in the mud, or crying temperamental tears, or parading up the street in Mother’s best clothes. A little girl can be sweeter (and badder) oftener than anyone else in the world. She can jitter around, and stomp, and make funny noises that frazzle your nerves, yet just when you open your mouth, she stands there demure with that special look in her eyes. A girl is Innocence playing in the mud, Beauty standing on its head, and Motherhood dragging a doll by the foot. God borrows from many creatures to make a little girl. He uses the song of a bird, the squeal of a pig, the stubbornness of a mule, the antics of a monkey, the spryness of a grasshopper, the curiosity of a cat, the speed of a gazelle, the slyness of a fox, the softness of a kitten, and to top it all off He adds the mysterious mind of a woman. A little girl likes new shoes, party dresses, small animals, first grade, noisemakers, the girl next door, dolls, make-believe, dancing lessons, ice cream, kitchens, coloring books, make-up, cans of water, going visiting, tea parties, and one boy. She doesn’t care so much for visitors, boys in general, large dogs, hand-me-downs, straight chairs, vegetables, snowsuits, or staying in the front yard. She is loudest when you are thinking, the prettiest when she has provoked you, the busiest at bedtime, the quietest when you want to show her off, and the most flirtatious when she absolutely must not get the best of you again. Who else can cause you more grief, joy, irritation, satisfaction, embarrassment, and genuine delight than this combination of Eve, Salome, and Florence Nightingale. She can muss up your home, your hair, and your dignity—spend your money, your time, and your patience—and just when your temper is ready to crack, her sunshine peeks through and you’ve lost again. Yes, she is a nerve-wracking nuisance, just a noisy bundle of mischief. But when your dreams tumble down and the world is a mess—when it seems you are pretty much of a fool after all—she can make you a king when she climbs on your knee and whispers, "I love you best of all!
Alan Beck
Quentin took a deep breath. “My true name,” he said, “ . . . is SUN WUKONG.” A cold wind passed through the open window, rustling my loose papers like tumbleweed. “I have no idea who that is,” I said. Quentin was still trying to cement his “look at me being serious” face. It took him a few seconds to realize I wasn’t flipping out over whoever he was. “The Sun Wukong,” he said, scooping the air with his fingers. “Sun Wukong the Monkey King.” “I said, I don’t know who that is.” His jaw dropped. Thankfully his teeth were still normal-size. “You’re Chinese and you don’t know me?” he sputtered. “That’s like an American child not knowing Batman!” “You’re Chinese Batman?” “No! I’m stronger than Batman, and more important, like—like. Tian na, how do you not know who I am!?” I didn’t know why he expected me to recognize him. He couldn’t have been a big-time actor or singer from overseas. I never followed mainland pop culture, but a lot of the other people at school did; word would have gotten around if we had a celebrity in our midst. Plus that was a weird stage name. Monkey King? Was that what passed for sexy among the kids these days?
F.C. Yee (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, #1))
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!
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)
...Is there a more monstrous thought, a more convincing spectacle, a more patent affirmation of the impotence and madness of the brain? War. All our philosophies, religions, arts, techniques and trades lead to nothing but this. The finest flowers of civilization. The purest constructions of thought. The most generous and altruistic passions of the heart. The most heroic gestures of man. War. Now and thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. No, it's not a ...more "...Is there a more monstrous thought, a more convincing spectacle, a more patent affirmation of the impotence and madness of the brain? War. All our philosophies, religions, arts, techniques and trades lead to nothing but this. The finest flowers of civilization. The purest constructions of thought. The most generous and altruistic passions of the heart. The most heroic gestures of man. War. Now and thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. No, it's not a question of your country, my German or French friend, or yours, whether you're black or white or Papuan or a Borneo monkey. It's a question of your life. If you want to live, kill. Kill so that you can be free, or eat, or shit. The shameful thing is to kill in masses, at a predetermined hour on a predetermined day, in honour of certain principles, under cover of a flag, with old men nodding approval, to kill in a disinterested or passive way. Stand alone against them all, young man, kill, kill, you are unique, you're the only man alive, kill until the others cut you short with the guillotine or the cord or the rope, with or without ceremony, in the name of the Community or King. What a laugh.
Blaise Cendrars (Moravagine)
Are you an evolutionist? I’m an absurdist, ma’am. But let’s suppose evolution is true; what about the monkeys today? Why can’t we see them evolving? Are they still evolving?
Harrison Wheeler (Jesters Incognito: Live Like a King. Hire a Jester.)
If seven hundred monkeys typed for seven hundred years, one of them would turn out the works of Shakespeare,
Stephen King (Night Shift)
When it comes to politics, it's best to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. That's a philosophy a lot of my monkeys used to share, said the Monkey King. But I disagree with it.
Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories)
Maybe it’s true that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But you’d go mad reading all of their rough drafts,
James Browning (The Fracking King)
I never could stomach these nationalists,” he exclaimed. “The destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.
T.H. White (The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4))
You spend your whole life chasing after some illusion you think is real, only to realize you’re a damned fool, and that if you reach any further, you’ll drown.” He let go of her arms. Rin turned around to face him. “Suni . . .” “Altan liked that story,” he said. “I first heard it from him. He told it whenever he needed to calm me down. Said it would help if I thought of the Monkey King as just another person, someone gullible and foolish, and not a god.
R.F. Kuang (The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War, #2))
The dwarf, the evil counselor, the twisted little monkey demon. I’m all that stands between them and chaos.
George R.R. Martin (A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, #2))
Now, many directors could and would say, So what? It’s just a movie. You don’t have to believe in giant monkeys to direct King Kong.
Quentin Tarantino (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood)
Radar came trotting back with her squeaky monkey.
Stephen King (Fairy Tale)
Not his circus, not his monkeys,
J.R. Ward (The Bourbon Kings (The Bourbon Kings, #1))
In New York—the New York of her own time, at least—they would have been objects of scorn and anger, the butt of every idiot’s crude, cruel jokes: a black woman of twenty-six and her whitebread lover who was three years younger and who had a tendency to talk like dis and dat when he got excited. Her whitebread lover who had been carrying a heavy monkey on his back only eight months before. Here, there was no one to jeer or laugh. Here, no one was pointing a finger. Here, there were only Roland, Eddie, and herself, the world’s last three gunslingers.
Stephen King (The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower, #3))
The Monkey King managed to outsmart or defeat most of these adversaries, but what came afterward was rather galling. If the demon at hand wasn’t killed and sent back to Hell immediately, it was often revealed to be an animal spirit from Heaven who had gained magic powers and used them to terrorize people on Earth. After Sun Wukong’s victory, a Chinese god would show up and be like, “Sorry, bruh, that ogre was actually my goldfish. I’ll take him back now.
F.C. Yee (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, #1))
I’m an old man trying to give a young daughter advice, and it’s like a monkey trying to teach table manners to a bear. A drunk driver took my son’s life seventeen years ago and my wife has never been the same since. I’ve always seen the question of abortion in terms of Fred. I seem to be helpless to see it any other way, just as helpless as you were to stop your giggles when they came on you at that poetry reading, Frannie. Your mother would argue against it for all the standard reasons. Morality, she’d say. A morality that goes back two thousand years. The right to life. All our Western morality is based on that idea. I’ve read the philosophers. I range up and down them like a housewife with a dividend check in the Sears and Roebuck store. Your mother sticks with the Reader’s Digest, but it’s me that ends up arguing from feeling and her from the codes of morality. I just see Fred. He was destroyed inside. There was no chance for him. These right-to-life biddies hold up their pictures of babies drowned in salt, and arms and legs scraped out onto a steel table, so what? The end of a life is never pretty. I just see Fred, lying in that bed for seven days, everything that was ruined pasted over with bandages. Life is cheap, abortion makes it cheaper. I read more than she does, but she is the one who ends up making more sense on this one. What we do and what we think… those things are so often based on arbitrary judgments when they are right. I can’t get over that. It’s like a block in my throat, how all true logic seems to proceed from irrationality. From faith. I’m not making much sense, am I?
Stephen King (The Stand)
So, to start with, you might be wondering how this chick with a monkey on her back about the size of King Kong is running about staking nasties and whatnot. Well, truth be told, I’ve been stretching the truth like it was a big handful of raspberry-flavored saltwater taffy.
Kathleen Tierney (Blood Oranges (Siobhan Quinn, #1))
The hand is a symbol of humanity, part of what makes us human - the hand that carved the Parthenon, painted the hands of God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote King Lear was the only hand that had known smallpox. That same hand had now given the disease to a monkey.
Richard Preston (The Demon in the Freezer)
Was it Robert Stone who said the mind is a monkey? Sure it was, in Dog Soldiers. The one where Stone also said that men who shoot elephants with machine guns from Huey helicopters are just naturally going to want to get high. In Iraq it was camels the grunts and jarheads sometimes shot at. But yeah, while they were high.
Stephen King (Billy Summers)
You broke the problem down and examined the component parts. Most men attempt to solve riddles by allowing their minds to leap like monkeys from branch to branch, without ever realizing that it is the root that needs examining. Always remember that, young prince. The method works with men as well as it works with riddles.
David Gemmell (Ghost King (Stones of Power, #1))
And that night he dreamed of the monkey again, one of its cymbals striking the Philco radio as it babbled out Dean Martin singing Whenna da moon hitta you eye like a big pizza pie ats-a moray, the radio tumbling into the bathtub as the monkey grinned and beat its cymbals together with a JANG and a JANG and a JANG; only it wasn’t the Italian rag-man who was in the tub when the water turned electric. It was him. •
Stephen King (Skeleton Crew: Stories)
dashed across streets without looking, they got horsing around in the lake and suddenly realized they had floated far past their depth on their rubber rafts and had to paddle back, they fell off monkey-bars on their asses and out of trees on their heads. Now, standing here in the fading drizzle in front of a Trustworthy Hardware Store that had been a pawnshop in 1958 (Frati Brothers, Ben recalled, the double windows always full of pistols and rifles and straight-razors and guitars hung up by their necks like exotic animals), it occurred to him that kids were better at almost dying, and they were also better at incorporating the inexplicable into their lives. They believed implicitly in the invisible world. Miracles both bright and dark were to be taken into consideration, oh yes, most certainly, but they by no means stopped the world. A sudden upheaval of beauty or terror at ten did not preclude an extra cheesedog or two for lunch at noon.
Stephen King (It)
Diamond writes: “We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities.” (If this sounds familiar, I would note that archaeology is thick with cautionary tales that speak directly to the twenty-first century.)
Douglas Preston (The Lost City of the Monkey God)
...Is there a more monstrous thought, a more convincing spectacle, a more patent affirmation of the impotence and madness of the brain? War. All our philosophies, religions, arts, techniques and trades lead to nothing but this. The finest flowers of civilization. The purest constructions of thought. The most generous and altruistic passions of the heart. The most heroic gestures of man. War. Now and thousand years ago. Tomorrow and a hundred thousand years ago. No, it's not a question of your country, my German or French friend, or yours, whether you're black or white or Papuan or a Borneo monkey. It's a question of your life. If you want to live, kill. Kill so that you can be free, or eat, or shit. The shameful thing is to kill in masses, at a predetermined hour on a predetermined day, in honour of certain principles, under cover of a flag, with old men nodding approval, to kill in a disinterested or passive way. Stand alone against them all, young man, kill, kill, you are unique, you're the only man alive, kill until the others cut you short with the guillotine or the cord or the rope, with or without ceremony, in the name of the Community or King. What a laugh.
Blaise Cendrars
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 . . .
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)
Your Eve was wise, John. She knew that Paradise would make her mad, if she were to live forever with Adam and know no other thing but strawberries and tigers and rivers of milk. She knew they would tire of these things, and each other. They would grow to hate every fruit, every stone, every creature they touched. Yet where could they go to find any new thing? It takes strength to live in Paradise and not collapse under the weight of it. It is every day a trial. And so Eve gave her lover the gift of time, time to the timeless, so that they could grasp at happiness. ... And this is what Queen Abir gave to us, her apple in the garden, her wisdom--without which we might all have leapt into the Rimal in a century. The rite bears her name still. For she knew the alchemy of demarcation far better than any clock, and decreed that every third century husbands and wives should separate, customs should shift and parchmenters become architects, architects farmers of geese and monkeys, Kings should become fishermen, and fishermen become players of scenes. Mothers and fathers should leave their children and go forth to get other sons and daughters, or to get none if that was their wish. On the roads of Pentexore folk might meet who were once famous lovers, or a mother and child of uncommon devotion--and they would laugh, and remember, but call each other by new names, and begin again as friends, or sisters, or lovers, or enemies. And some time hence all things would be tossed up into the air once more and land in some other pattern. If not for this, how fastened, how frozen we would be, bound to one self, forever a mother, forever a child. We anticipate this refurbishing of the world like children at a holiday. We never know what we will be, who we will love in our new, brave life, how deeply we will wish and yearn and hope for who knows what impossible thing! Well, we anticipate it. There is fear too, and grief. There is shaking, and a worry deep in the bone. Only the Oinokha remains herself for all time--that is her sacrifice for us. There is sadness in all this, of course--and poets with long elegant noses have sung ballads full of tears that break at one blow the hearts of a flock of passing crows! But even the most ardent lover or doting father has only two hundred years to wait until he may try again at the wheel of the world, and perhaps the wheel will return his wife or his son to him. Perhaps not. Wheels, and worlds, are cruel. Time to the timeless, apples to those who live without hunger. There is nothing so sweet and so bitter, nothing so fine and so sharp.
Catherynne M. Valente (The Habitation of the Blessed (A Dirge for Prester John, #1))
But the clown did not disappear along that curve that seemed to define the edge of that old existence. Instead, it leaped with a scary, nimble grace onto a lamppost that stood in the extreme left foreground of the picture. It shinnied up like a monkey on a stick—and suddenly its face was pressed against the tough plastic sheet Will Hanlon had put over each of the pages in his book. Beverly screamed again and this time Eddie joined her, although his scream was faint and blue-breathless. The plastic bulged out—later they would all agree they saw it. Bill saw the bulb of the clown’s red nose flatten, the way your nose will flatten when you press it against a windowpane. “Kill you all!” The clown was laughing and screaming. “Try to stop me and I’ll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can’t stop me! I’m the Gingerbread Man! I’m the Teenage Werewolf!” And for a moment It was the Teenage
Stephen King (It)
Training—training is everything; training is all there is to a person.  We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.  All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.  And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me :  the rest may land in Sheol and welcome for all I care.
Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)
them—or something like it. They even got the Doctor some tobacco one day, when he had finished what he had brought with him and wanted to smoke. At night they slept in tents made of palm leaves, on thick, soft beds of dried grass. And after a while they got used to walking such a lot and did not get so tired and enjoyed the life of travel very much. But they were always glad when the night came and they stopped for their resting time. Then the Doctor used to make a little fire of sticks; and after they had had their supper, they would sit round it in a ring, listening to Polynesia singing songs about the sea, or to Chee-Chee telling stories of the jungle. And many of the tales that Chee-Chee told were very interesting. Because although the monkeys had no history books of their own before Doctor Dolittle came to write them for them, they remember everything that happens by telling stories to their children. And Chee-Chee spoke of many things his grandmother had told him—tales of long, long, long ago, before Noah and the Flood—of the days when men dressed in bearskins and lived in holes in the rock and ate their mutton raw because they did not know what cooking was, never having seen a fire. And he told them of the great mammoths, and lizards as long as a train, that wandered over the mountains in those times, nibbling from the treetops. And often they got so interested listening that when he had finished they found their fire had gone right out, and they had to scurry around to get more sticks and build a new one. Now, when the King’s army had gone back and told the King that they couldn’t find the Doctor, the King sent them out again and told them they must stay in the jungle till they caught him. So all this time, while the Doctor and his animals were going along toward the Land of the Monkeys, thinking themselves quite safe, they were still being followed by the King’s men. If Chee-Chee had known this, he would most likely have hidden them again. But he didn’t know it. One day Chee-Chee climbed up a high rock and looked out over the treetops. And when he came down he said they were now quite close to the Land of the Monkeys and would soon be there. And that same evening, sure enough, they saw Chee-Chee’s cousin and a lot of other monkeys, who had not yet gotten sick, sitting in the trees by the edge of a swamp, looking and waiting for them. And when they saw the famous doctor really come, these monkeys made a tremendous noise, cheering and waving leaves and swinging out of the branches to greet him. They wanted to carry his bag and his trunk and everything he had. And one of the bigger ones even carried Gub-Gub, who had gotten
Hugh Lofting (The Story of Doctor Dolittle (Doctor Dolittle Series))
He found himself thinking of something Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called Sparx, a group everybody seemed to think that year's Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and a monkey on his back. He progressed from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After a while he was just another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but he was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. He didn't talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had disappeared. And Barry Grieg had said: 'He's come out the other side.' That was all. No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just . . . come out the other side. Or you don't.
Stephen King (The Stand)
He found himself thinking of something Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called Sparx, a group everybody seemed to think that year's Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and a monkey on his back. He progressed from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After a while he was just another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but he was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. He didn't talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had disappeared. And Barry Grieg had said: 'He's come out the other side.' That was all. No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just . . . come out the other side. Or you don't.
Stephen King (The Stand)
He found himself thinking of something Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called Sparx, a group everybody seemed to think that year's Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and a monkey on his back. He progressed from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After a while he was just another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but he was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. He didn't talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had disappeared. And Barry Grieg had said: 'He's come out the other side.' That was all. No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just . . . come out the other side. Or you don't.
Stephen King (The Stand)
once there was a great king who gazed down from a tall tower upon a gardener who sang as he worked, and the king cried, ‘Ah, to have a life of no cares! If only I could be that gardener.’ And the voice of the August Personage of Jade reached out from Heaven and said, ‘It shall be so,’ and lo, the king was a gardener singing in the sun. In time the sun grew hot and the gardener stopped singing, and a fine dark cloud brought coolness and then drifted away, and it was hot again and much work remained, and the gardener cried, ‘Ah, to carry coolness wherever I go and have no cares! If only I could be that cloud.’ And the voice of the August Personage reached out from Heaven and said, ‘It shall be so,’ and lo, the gardener was a cloud drifting across the sky. And the wind blew and the sky grew cold, and the cloud would have liked to go behind the shelter of a hill, but it could only go where the wind took it, and no matter how hard it tried to go this way the wind took it that way, and above the cloud was the bright sun. ‘Ah, to fly through wind and be warm and have no cares! If only I could be the sun,’ cried the cloud, and the voice of the August Personage of Jade reached out from Heaven and said, ‘It shall be so,’ and lo, he was the sun. It was very grand to be the sun, and he delighted in the work of sending down rays to warm some things and burn others, but it was like wearing a suit made of fire and he began to bake like bread. Above him the cool stars that were gods were sparkling in safety and serenity and the sun cried, ‘Ah, to be divine and free from care! If only I could be a god.’ And the voice of the August Personage of Jade reached out from Heaven and said, ‘It shall be so,’ and lo, he was a god, and he was beginning his third century of combat with the Stone Monkey, which had just transformed itself into a monster a hundred thousand feet tall and was wielding a trident made from the triple peaks of Mount Hua, and when he wasn’t dodging blows he could see the peaceful green earth down below him, and the god cried, ‘Ah, if only I could be a man who was safe and secure and had no cares!’ And the voice of the August Personage of Jade reached out from Heaven and said, ‘It shall be so.’ And lo, he was a king who was gazing down from a tall tower upon a gardener who sang as he worked.
Barry Hughart (The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox (The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, #1-3))
Page 25: …Maimonides was also an anti-Black racist. Towards the end of the [Guide to the Perplexed], in a crucial chapter (book III, chapter 51) he discusses how various sections of humanity can attain the supreme religious value, the true worship of God. Among those who are incapable of even approaching this are: "Some of the Turks [i.e., the Mongol race] and the nomads in the North, and the Blacks and the nomads in the South, and those who resemble them in our climates. And their nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does." Now, what does one do with such a passage in a most important and necessary work of Judaism? Face the truth and its consequences? God forbid! Admit (as so many Christian scholars, for example, have done in similar circumstances) that a very important Jewish authority held also rabid anti-Black views, and by this admission make an attempt at self-education in real humanity? Perish the thought. I can almost imagine Jewish scholars in the USA consulting among themselves, ‘What is to be done?’ – for the book had to be translated, due to the decline in the knowledge of Hebrew among American Jews. Whether by consultation or by individual inspiration, a happy ‘solution’ was found: in the popular American translation of the Guide by one Friedlander, first published as far back as 1925 and since then reprinted in many editions, including several in paperback, the Hebrew word Kushim, which means Blacks, was simply transliterated and appears as ‘Kushites’, a word which means nothing to those who have no knowledge of Hebrew, or to whom an obliging rabbi will not give an oral explanation. During all these years, not a word has been said to point out the initial deception or the social facts underlying its continuation – and this throughout the excitement of Martin Luther King’s campaigns, which were supported by so many rabbis, not to mention other Jewish figures, some of whom must have been aware of the anti-Black racist attitude which forms part of their Jewish heritage. Surely one is driven to the hypothesis that quite a few of Martin Luther King’s rabbinical supporters were either anti-Black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of ‘Jewish interest’ (wishing to win Black support for American Jewry and for Israel’s policies) or were accomplished hypocrites, to the point of schizophrenia, capable of passing very rapidly from a hidden enjoyment of rabid racism to a proclaimed attachment to an anti-racist struggle – and back – and back again.
Israel Shahak (Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years)
What are we doing here?” Burnes said, almost to himself. “That, Burnes, I cannot tell you. I do not know why anyone leaves his house, to travel ten thousand miles, when all the poetry that has ever been written, all the poetry since the beginning of the world all tells us the single lesson that we would be happiest in our own homes, since that is where happiness is born, and where it lives. What poetry cannot answer is the question that follows from that, whether we men actually want to be happy, or whether we would prefer to be restless. In your case—in the English, excuse me, the British case—I would say that when you have gone home, when you are all old and thinking about what this adventure, this whole centuries-long adventure meant, what it meant to you . . . well, things do not always mean something, but perhaps your adventure, perhaps it meant something. You will sit at home and look into your fires and draw your Cashmire shawls about you, and think that you came here for one reason. Of course, now, you tell yourself all sorts of fairy stories—you are here to sell us your wonderful English goods, you want to set us free, you want us to grow up, you want to educate us and make us worship three gods instead of forty thousand—” “Only one God.” “I stand corrected, Burnes-ji, and I am sure your one God is much more sensible than ours, who are quaint, who have the heads of elephants and monkeys and have blue skin. They are all very good reasons to tell yourself at the time, but they are not, at the bottom, the real reason you came here. You came here not to make yourselves rich, not to make us better and Christian and clean and dressed in Bradford cotton. You believe all this, I know. But when you are old and tired and sleeping in a thousand years’ time, you will start to realize that you came here and took possession of what was not yours for one reason. To surrender it, to give it up. That is the only reason. Do you not know your Shakespeare, Burnes? Have you never seen The Tempest in your London theatres? Do you not think it strange that, so very long ago, before your English kings owned anything at all, your English poet was dreaming of giving it all up, of surrendering what was not yet yours? Of what never would truly be yours? You are not adventurers; you are all Prosperos, waiting for the day you can give it up, drown your book, and return nobly. We endure your presence, because we see that when you look at us, you know that we will take it all back one day. And you want us to. That desire is so strong in you, it makes you build an empire; because if you never had an empire, you would not have one so nobly to surrender. That, Burnes, is what you are doing here. You asked me, and you did not think that I had an answer. But I have an answer, and that is what you are doing here. And now you are tired, and I shall leave you.
Philip Hensher (The Mulberry Empire)
Especially good spirits might be brought to the Land of Darkness only briefly or not at all.
Aaron Shepard (The Monkey King: A Superhero Tale of China (Ancient Fantasy Book 4))
My mother folded each pair of trousers over her arm, pulling the legs out so that the creases lay perfectly. She handles clothes meticulously. S did Nai-nai. But there was a difference in attitude. To my grandmother, clothes held a kind of magic--they could change your destiny one way or the other. To my mother, they were servile, like farm animals in China. Treat them well and they'll perform their function.
Patricia Chao (Monkey King)
THE ROYAL PIGEON Nasruddin became prime minister to the king. Once while he wandered through the palace, he saw a royal falcon. Now Nasruddin had never seen this kind of a pigeon before. So he got out a pair of scissors and trimmed the claws, the wings and the beak of the falcon. “Now you look like a decent bird,” he said. “Your keeper had evidently been neglecting you. “You’re different so there’s something wrong with you!” MONKEY SALVATION FOR A FISH
Leonard J. Duhl (The Social Entrepreneurship of Change)
The monkeys ignored him completely as they discussed wind currents and angle of approach, and even the Lion seemed to have forgotten he was there. He might as well be back in that field tied to a post for all the good the Wizard's gifts were doing him.
Danielle Paige (The Straw King (Dorothy Must Die, #0.5))
The power of kings is transitory, like everything else. Royal glory is difficult to climb, like a bamboo; it is hard to hold, being fidgety like a monkey on a treetop; it is balanced precariously, like drops of water on a lotus-leaf; it is changeable, like the path of the wind; it is undependable, like the friendship of a dishonest man; it is difficult to tame, like a serpent; it glistens only for a moment, like a cloud at sunset; it is fragile, like bubbles on the surface of a river; it is elusive, like the treasure attained in a dream. Remember all this, and enjoy your kingdom modestly.
V.S. Narvane (Best Stories from Indian Classics: A History of Valour and Devotion)
Zach’s Fanfare #2” (MFSB)* “Comeback Kid” (Sleigh Bells) “Monkey Gone to Heaven” (The Pixies) “Spaceman” (Harry Nilsson) “Going Down” (Freddie King) “I’m Bad” (Rocket to Memphis) “Pumped Up Kicks” (Foster the People) “Nobody Does It Better” (Me First and the Gimme Gimmes) “Skull & Crossbones” (Sparkle Moore & Dan Belloc and His Orchestra) “Switchblade Smiles” (Kasabian) “I Wanna Destroy You” (The Soft Boys) “Drain You” (Foxy Shazam) “T.O.R.N.A.D.O.” (The Go! Team) “Woman of Mass Destruction” (The Woolly Bandits) “Tough Lover” (Nick Curran and the Lowlifes) “(I’m Stuck in a Pagoda With) Tricia Toyota” (The Dickies) “Apache” (The Sugarhill Gang) “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (Metallica) “We All Go Back to Where We Belong” (R.E.M.) “Change Reaction” (David Uosikkinen) “Satellite” (The Hooters) “Fanfare for Rocky” (Bill Conti)*
Duane Swierczynski (Point & Shoot (Charlie Hardie, #3))
You're an ordinary man who was given an extraordinary choice, said the Monkey King. Do you regret your choice?
Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories)
Ron Gilbert, took inspiration from Sierra games like King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry but, more than just the game, what Maniac Mansion (and Ron) gave LucasArts was the underlying engine created for the game, SCUMM‡. This would form the backbone of future hits for the company such as Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Maniac Mansion sequel Day of the Tentacle, two Indiana Jones games (one based on The Last Crusade, the other an original adventure called The Fate of Atlantis), Sam & Max Hit the Road and, most famously, The Secret of Monkey Island. Humour permeates all these games successfully in a way it rarely has before or since. Monkey Island’s ‘insult’ sword-fight is perhaps the best-known example, but there are many more. The jokes even operate between games;
Steve McNeil (Hey! Listen!: A journey through the golden era of video games)
We looked like the pictures of ourselves in my children’s book. The Monkey King and the Ruyi Jingu Bang, leading a holy figure atop a dragon horse.
F.C. Yee (The Iron Will of Genie Lo (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, #2))
In Maya culture, the holy lords had a responsibility to keep the cosmos in order and appease the gods through ceremonies and rituals. The commoners were willing to support this privileged class as long as they kept up their end of the bargain with effective rituals. But after 650, deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion began reducing crop yields. The working classes, the farmers and monument builders, may have suffered increasing hunger and disease, even as the rulers hogged an ever-larger share of resources. The society was heading for a crisis. Diamond writes: “We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities.” (If this sounds familiar, I would note that archaeology is thick with cautionary tales that speak directly to the twenty-first century.)
Douglas Preston (The Lost City of the Monkey God)
to support this privileged class as long as they kept up their end of the bargain with effective rituals. But after 650, deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion began reducing crop yields. The working classes, the farmers and monument builders, may have suffered increasing hunger and disease, even as the rulers hogged an ever-larger share of resources. The society was heading for a crisis. Diamond writes: “We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities.” (If this sounds familiar, I would note that archaeology is thick with cautionary tales that speak directly to the twenty-first century.)
Douglas Preston (The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story)
As soon as the meeting was adjourned, Piper sprang eagerly from her seat and went over to look at the netsuke. Minute scales were precisely carved into a tiny coiled snake. Every whisker appeared on a sleeping calico. A writhing dragon licked flames with his jagged tongue. But the netsuke that fascinated Piper the most was a monkey perched on a rock as it wrestled and held down the tentacles of a small octopus. The hairs of the monkey and the expression on its face were equally detailed. Even the tiny suction cups on the octopus's tentacles could be seen. "That's one of my favorites." Piper looked up to see Cryder standing there. "In the Japanese legend," he continued, "the octopus was a physician to the Dragon King of the Sea and prescribed a monkey's liver to heal the king's daughter. But the smart little monkey evaded capture.
Mary Jane Clark (Footprints in the Sand (Wedding Cake Mystery, #3))
WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR PAST Serve it with lemons and curdled milk with shortbread biscuits make the day gray spots of rain. Make a quilt out of the villains crochet the heroes together in a hat Wear the hat. Use the quilt as a picnic blanket. Bring your friends. Watch the squirrels be tiny monkeys dare-deviling the trees. Exclaim things! Each lemon, sup of tea, cookie is a bite into the future / will digest, exit, and swim. Digest. Exit. Swim. Drink the curdled milk and get sick watch your friends clean up hold your hair back / hat on hand you a tissue. When you wash the vomit out of the villainous quilt each time it gets weaker Picnic often.
A.S. King (Switch)
Ramana Maharshi’s message was clear—we must first seek to understand ourselves. Without knowledge of our superior spiritual nature, we will remain tied to the trivial and mundane. In our present bodily consciousness, our situation is like the eagle in the story below. An eagle’s egg was placed amid a brood of chickens. Thinking it to be one of their own, the hens lovingly hatched it along with their own eggs. Consequently, the baby eagle which emerged from it grew up in the company of little chicks. The result was ‘monkey see, monkey do’. The chicks would say, ‘Cluck, cluck, cluck’, and the baby eagle would also cackle along. The chicks would flutter their wings and hop clumsily on the ground. The eagle would do the same, unaware of its God-given ability to fly at altitudes of 10,000 feet above the ground. One day, an adult eagle flew by. The baby eagle looked at it with amazement, and exclaimed, ‘Wow, what a majestic bird! How is it flying at such a glorious height with so much elegance?’ ‘That is an eagle’, replied the chickens. ‘It is the king of birds; naturally, its abilities are far greater. We cannot do what it can do.’ The baby eagle believed the chickens’ sermon, and it continued its pathetic life, fluttering and cackling like them. What a pity! It was born to rule the skies but had become conditioned to flutter on the ground. Like the eagle, we too were fashioned to sparkle in the magnificence of our spirit but became illusioned to wallow in the mediocrity of bodily conceptions. As a poet said: phūla chunane āye the bāge-hayāt meṅ, khāra jhāra meṅ dāmana ulaphā kara raha gaye ‘We had come to pluck flowers from the garden of life, but in the ensuing hustle and bustle of human existence, we ended up entangled in thorns.’ On realizing our soul nature, what becomes our potential? The next section provides the answer. The
Swami Mukundananda (7 Divine Laws to Awaken Your Best Self)
The Handsome Monkey King had enjoyed this insouciant existence for three or four hundred years when one day, while feasting with the rest of the monkeys, he suddenly grew sad and shed a few tears. Alarmed, the monkeys surrounding him bowed down and asked, “What is disturbing the Great King?” The Monkey King replied, “Though I am very happy at the moment, I am a little concerned about the future. Hence I’m distressed.” The monkeys all laughed and said, “The Great King indeed does not know contentment! Here we daily have a banquet on an immortal mountain in a blessed land, in an ancient cave on a divine continent. We are not subject to the unicorn or the phoenix, nor are we governed by the rulers of mankind. Such independence and comfort are immeasurable blessings. Why, then, does he worry about the future?” The Monkey King said, “Though we are not subject to the laws of man today, nor need we be threatened by the rule of any bird or beast, old age and physical decay in the future will disclose the secret sovereignty of Yama, King of the Underworld. If we die, shall we not have lived in vain, not being able to rank forever among the Heavenly beings?
Wu Cheng'en (Journey To The West, volume 1)
As the expression goes, when there is no tiger in the mountain, the monkey declares himself king.
Stacey Lee (Outrun the Moon)
She pulled the shell of a cicada from a pine tree’s trunk, turned it over to show the neat slit down the belly where, having grown, it had wriggled out of its old self into something new. And she told him stories. Stories about warriors and princesses, poor brave girls and boys, monsters and magicians. The brother and sister who outwitted the witch and found their way home. The girl who saved her swan-brothers from enchantment. Ancient myths that made sense of the world: why sunflowers nod, why echoes linger, why spiders spin. Stories her mother had told her in childhood, before she stopped speaking of such things: how once there had been nine suns, baking the earth to dust, until a brave archer shot them one by one out of the sky. How the monkey king tricked his way into the heavenly garden to steal the peaches of immortality. How once a year, two lovers, forever separated, crossed a river of stars to meet in midair.
Celeste Ng (Our Missing Hearts)
What does this King Kong do?” asked Alberta. “He’s a giant monkey.
David Walliams (Awful Auntie)
I am Mata Zyndu, I had come to study Huno Krima and Zopa Shigin, the heroes of the rebellion. But all I see is a monkey dressed up like a man. You're no different from any of the fools Mapidéré had elevated above their station. Neither Imperial fiat nor popular acclaim can make an ant into an elephant. A man can never fulfill a role he is not born for.
Ken Liu (The Grace of Kings (The Dandelion Dynasty, #1))
Don't you think, perhaps, that we all have a bit of bad inside us?
Van Hoang (Girl Giant and the Monkey King (Girl Giant and the Monkey King #1))
Diamond writes: “We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities.” (If this sounds familiar, I would note that archaeology is thick with cautionary tales that speak directly to the twenty-first century
Douglas Preston (The Lost City of the Monkey God)
Jackal: Who gets the lion’s share - that’s what it’s all about, whether it’s between children, or animals, or warlords. It’s not that everyone wants a piece; it’s that everyone wants the biggest piece. And the biggest piece doesn’t go to the monkey, or to the giraffe - the biggest piece goes to the lion, because the lion is the fucking king. That’s how it works. It worked that way a million years before there were men saying otherwise, that’s probably how it should work. Oluwagembi: But you are not the lion - they call you "The Jackal". Jackal: Shh... sometimes the jackal steals the lion’s share; but don’t tell anyone.
Far Cry 2
He rushed at it again, meaning to stomp it, smash it, jump on it until cogs and gears flew and its horrible glass eyes rolled along the floor. But just as he reached it, its cymbals came together once more, very softly… (jang)… as a spring somewhere inside expanded one final, minute notch… and a sliver of ice seemed to whisper its way through the walls of his heart, impaling it, stilling its fury and leaving him sick with terror again. The monkey almost seemed to know—how gleeful its grin seemed!
Stephen King (Skeleton Crew: Stories)
When it comes to politics, it’s best to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” That’s a philosophy a lot of my monkeys used to share, said the Monkey King. But I disagree with it.
John Joseph Adams (Futures & Fantasies)
- So what do you want me to do, Adam? I cannot be everywhere at the same time. I already have to be in three places at once, not just two. My Spanish is much better than it was half a year ago, but I am not native, Adam - I am not Catalan, I am not Spanish. - Alright, alright, alright. Jesus. - What do you mean, Boss Jesus? I am Tomas, the king of the Goys, not the Jews. - HAHAHA. Get serious now. This costs me money. - You’re kidding. You don’t even pay me a salary and my girlfriend is crazy about it. How do you want me to make over 10,000 Euros in net traffic a month if you are sending me to the same Estanco stores that never order and barely have any traffic, just wasting my time, Adam? - Mario made a lot of business with Estancos. - Bullshit, Boss. Mario, Mister Jerk Twister made monkey-business with a handful of Estancos. He sold a set of twelve crumble-cards with a free display in 2012 Spring and he never showed up again, they said. Was he even in Spain, Adam? - That’s not the point. - OK. So what is the point? - Mario made a lot of business. - Would you like to show me the total sum of wholesale figures Mario allegedly made in 2012, Boss? - No. - Because Mario didn’t make 10 000 Euros traffic in an entire year, Boss. Monkey-business. - You are spending 140 Euros on these two kids for the two catalogs and wasting time here with Rachel. - So do you want Rachel to stay here all night to laminate all this by herself, or may I help her so that we can give the catalogs to the two kids and we at least triple our potential tomorrow, so they can do sales, Adam, so they could go and visit all the Estancos as you wish? - Yeah, sure. - Thank you. Adam the tiny Estancos are seasonal and some of them don’t even keep our kinds of products they rely soley on tobacco sales, elder Catalan people. Clubs are opening at every corner, Adam and they need us to supply them with products. They won’t be so seasonal, they cannot rely on the tourism by law they cannot register walk-ins. - Cccc. They register anyone, what are you talking about? - No. Which club? - Club Alfalfa. The custom card client, Mario and Tom made in 2012. - Yeah, the marijuana club where there were two Police razzias both found cocaine twice behind the booth, so far. - But they are open again. Selling weed. - For how long Adam? How many times can they re-open after the Police had shut the club down twice already because of cocaine? How many members or employees they arrested, Adam? Would you bail me out if I go inside the wrong door one day, representing you?
Tomas Adam Nyapi (BARCELONA MARIJUANA MAFIA)
The trouble with dogs (supposing you don't beat or kick them, of course) is they trust you. you're the food-giver and shelter-provider. You're the one that can fish the squeaky monkey out from beneath the couch with one of your clever five-fingered paws. You are also the love-giver. The problem with that kind of unquestioning trust is that it carries a weight of responsibility. Mostly that's okay. In our current situation it was anything but.
Stephen King
From up here she had a clear view of the garden below. Just next to the wall was the worn bench where Mulan had so often sat with Grandmother, helping her sort vegetables as Nai Nai told fantastic stories of the monkey king, the zodiac animals, the thunder god's wife, and the woman on the moon. When Mulan expressed awe at those adventures, Grandmother told her about the adventures in store for her. "See how wide your forehead is?" Grandmother would say. "That means you'll travel far and bring back good fortune." "I will?" Mulan responded, rapt. "Yes, but it will not be easy," Nai Nai said, and she'd point to a scar on Mulan's temple from a childhood fall. "That scar means you'll struggle and face hardship, but if you persevere, you will overcome it." How right Grandmother been. During long cold nights in the army, when the ground sent icicles through her hopes, Mulan had clung to Grandmother's words.
Livia Blackburne (Feather and Flame (The Queen's Council, #2))
Page 25: …Maimonides was also an anti-Black racist. Towards the end of the [Guide to the Perplexed], in a crucial chapter (book III, chapter 51) he discusses how various sections of humanity can attain the supreme religious value, the true worship of God. Among those who are incapable of even approaching this are: Some of the Turks [i.e., the Mongol race] and the nomads in the North, and the Blacks and the nomads in the South, and those who resemble them in our climates. And their nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does. Now, what does one do with such a passage in a most important and necessary work of Judaism? Face the truth and its consequences? God forbid! Admit (as so many Christian scholars, for example, have done in similar circumstances) that a very important Jewish authority held also rabid anti-Black views, and by this admission make an attempt at self-education in real humanity? Perish the thought. I can almost imagine Jewish scholars in the USA consulting among themselves, ‘What is to be done?’ – for the book had to be translated, due to the decline in the knowledge of Hebrew among American Jews. Whether by consultation or by individual inspiration, a happy ‘solution’ was found: in the popular American translation of the Guide by one Friedlander, first published as far back as 1925 and since then reprinted in many editions, including several in paperback, the Hebrew word Kushim, which means Blacks, was simply transliterated and appears as ‘Kushites’, a word which means nothing to those who have no knowledge of Hebrew, or to whom an obliging rabbi will not give an oral explanation. During all these years, not a word has been said to point out the initial deception or the social facts underlying its continuation – and this throughout the excitement of Martin Luther King’s campaigns, which were supported by so many rabbis, not to mention other Jewish figures, some of whom must have been aware of the anti-Black racist attitude which forms part of their Jewish heritage. Surely one is driven to the hypothesis that quite a few of Martin Luther King’s rabbinical supporters were either anti-Black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of ‘Jewish interest’ (wishing to win Black support for American Jewry and for Israel’s policies) or were accomplished hypocrites, to the point of schizophrenia, capable of passing very rapidly from a hidden enjoyment of rabid racism to a proclaimed attachment to an anti-racist struggle – and back – and back again.
Israel Shahak (Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years)
I told her that I was trying to decide what to do with my own father. I could not imagine continuing a relationship with him as I tried to climb out from the enormous pile of rubble that was my past. But at the same time, there was that guilt. What I owed him for those trips to the Tech Museum and the beach when I was a child, when he taught me about the Monkey King and tucked me in every night. What I owed him for the time when we both believed he loved me.
Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
There’s nothing funny about watching a Bela Lugosi (actually, a stand-in was used for most shots) wracked with pain, a morphine monkey on his back, creeping around a southern California development with his Dracula cape pulled up over his nose.
Stephen King (Danse macabre)
He shook his head in disbelief that such a thing could have happened. "Shall we ever know the inside story?" he said. "Uncle Eric's inside the sea-monkeys," said Bertie. "That's the story.
Dick King-Smith (Dodos Are Forever)
There’s a Jewish folktale about a biblical king who dispatches one of his wise men to craft him a mantra that would both humble the proud and console the unfortunate. After searching in the market, where our wise man consults a local jeweler, he returns to the king with an engraved ring. The king holds the ring close and reads: THIS TOO SHALL PASS. So remember that, when lamenting your troubles, contemplating the perceived triumphs of peers and competitors, or rejoicing in that rare entrepreneurial triumph. It will all soon pass, and much faster than you think.
Antonio García Martínez (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)
We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities.” (If this sounds familiar, I would note that archaeology is thick with cautionary tales that speak directly to the twenty-first century.)
Douglas Preston (The Lost City of the Monkey God)
I wanted to ask him if this was his choice or his dad's. It didn't seem fair that no one had talked to him about college or any other options. It didn't seem fair that he'd get a free bike for doing what he was told rather than thinking for himself. It didn't seem right that he would be rewarded for turning into a trained monkey at the age of fifteen.
A.S. King (Please Ignore Vera Dietz)
You put five intelligent people together and they vote like an idiot.
Griffin Ondaatje (The Monkey King & Other Stories)
The west has systematically peddled morons and monkeys as kings heroic, white suffering is human suffering, while the colored belong on national geographic.
Abhijit Naskar (Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets)
Dedicated to Hitler (Sonnet of Lesser Evil) I'll write a book of german sonnets, and dedicate it to Adolf Hitler. The very thought makes you mad right! I feel the same way when you glorify Churchill as savior. The west has systematically peddled morons and monkeys as kings heroic, white suffering is human suffering, while the colored belong on national geographic. Sure every society has its own troubles, All of humanity has its inhumanity. But the west doesn't have the high ground, to pass judgment on ethics and morality. If morality did have a scale, West would be scraping the bottom. If this tickles you the wrong way, You are what is wrong with our western world.
Abhijit Naskar (Visvavatan: 100 Demilitarization Sonnets)
Grandma’s Bag of Stories Sudha Murty When Grandma opens her bag of stories, everyone gathers around. Who can resist a good story, especially when it’s being told by Grandma? From her bag emerge tales of kings and cheats, monkeys and mice, bears and gods. Here comes the bear who ate some really bad dessert and got very angry; a lazy man who would not put out a fire till it reached his beard; a princess who got turned into an onion; a queen who discovered silk, and many more weird and wonderful people and animals. Grandma tells the stories over long summer days and nights, as seven children enjoy life in her little town. The stories entertain, educate and provide hours of enjoyment to them. So come, why don’t you too join in the fun?
Sudha Murty (The Bird with the Golden Wings: Stories of Wit and Magic)
I’ve set myself to become the King of the Pirates…and if I die trying…then at least I tried!
Eiichiro Oda (ONE PIECE 0)
the island was full of luscious greenery, trees with beautiful leaves.
Van Hoang (Girl Giant and the Monkey King (Girl Giant and the Monkey King #1))