“!-- Setting forth once more, embarking upon the search once again: the narrow path that snakes among livid rocks and desolate, camel-colored hills; white houses hanging suspended from cliffs, looking as though they were about to let go and fall on the wayfarer’s head; the smell of sweating hides and cow dung; the buzz of afternoon; the screams of monkeys leaping about amid the branches of the trees or scampering along the flat rooftops or swinging from the railings of a balcony; overhead, birds circling and the bluish spirals of smoke rising from kitchen fires; the almost pink light on the stones; the taste of salt on parched lips; the sound of loose earth slithering away beneath one’s feet; the dust that clings to one’s sweat-drenched skin, makes one’s eyes red, and chokes one’s lungs; i --> Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms — all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet…. The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.”
Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 1
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Octavio Paz 71
Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Lite… 1914–1998Related quotes

“White moon gleaming
Among trees,
From every branch
Sound rising into
Canopies.”
La lune blanche
Luit dans les bois;
De chaque branche
Part une voix
Sous la ramée.
"La lune blanche", line 1, from La Bonne Chanson (1872); Sorrell p. 57

Book 3 (Sefer Zemanim "Times"), Treatise 8 (Kiddush HaChodesh "Sanctification of the New Moon"), closing words
Mishneh Torah (c. 1180)

Song lyrics, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), My Back Pages

“The lion does not care about a monkey laughing at him from a tree.”
Saddam Hussein, Defiant Dictator Who Ruled Iraq With Violence and Fear, Dies http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/30/world/middleeast/30saddam.html (The New York Times, 30 December 2006, page A10)
In response to guffaws from a spectator in an overhead gallery during his trial, 2006.
“There once was upon a time a poor widow who had an only son Jack, and a cow called Milky-White.”
English Fairy Tales (1890), Preface to English Fairy Tales, Jack and the Beanstalk

Extract from the title poem Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana [Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, Defintion Press, (1957)]