A garland of quotations IX

Culled from the finest primates in literary history, and re-woven every Monday

I weel make a you to kees the monkey.
•Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh (1864).

Words leap like monkeys from tree to tree, but in that dark place where a man has his roots he is deprived of their kind mediation.
•Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities II (1932).

Politeness is natural, says the ape.
•Welsh proverb; quoted in Matthew Arnold, The Study of Celtic Literature (1867).

The monkeys, it is said, give birth to two children at once. Of these two children the mother cherishes and feeds one with tender care, whereas she despises and neglects the other one. So it happens that, by divine fate, the little one that the mother takes care of with love and clasps in her arms is suffocated to death by her, and the one she neglects reaches a perfect maturity.
•Æsop

I cannot tell who loves the Skeleton
Of a poor Marmoset. Nought but boan, boan.
Give me a nakednesse with her cloath’s on.
•Richard Lovelace, “La Bella Bona Roba” (1649).

Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange prodigious creatures, man)
A spirit free to choose for my own share
What case of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear.
•Lord Rochester, “A Satyr against Mankind” (1674?).

Poor Gratia, in her twentieth year,
     Forseeing future woe,
Chose to attend a monkey here,
     Before an ape below.
•William Shenstone, from Select Epigrams, Volume the First (1797).

Oh! happy Sound! henceforth, let no one tell,
That Huncamunca shall lead Apes in Hell.
•Henry Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731).

Monkeys pair with monkeys, deer go out with deer, and fish play around with fish. Men claim that Mao-ch’iang and Lady Li were beautiful, but if fish saw them they would dive to the bottom of the stream, if birds saw them they would fly away, and if deer saw them they would break into a run. Of these four, which knows how to fix the standard of beauty for the world?
•Zhuang Zhou (C4 BC).

You know, all over Africa, apes and other wild things that climb are falling out of trees at an unprecedented rate.
•James McClure, Pvt. Wars (1980).

I hate babies. They’re so human—they remind one of monkeys.
•Saki, The Watched Pot (pub. 1924).

References: Musil: trans. Sophie Wilkins (Vintage, 1996); Aesop: trans. Olivia & Robert Temple, The Complete Fables (Penguin, 1998); Zhuang Zhou: trans. Burton Watson, Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings (Columbia UP, 1964); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.