Rats Quotes

Before one actually visits them, everyone tends to think of their favorite countries as one grand Disneyland filled with national monuments and historical treasures conveniently laid out for easy viewing, when what they really are filled with, of course, is people going to work, laundromats and places to buy rat poison. ~ Bette Midler

I'll keep it," she said. "Then, when you get back, after you and the dark one are done making out and planning a future filled with blond-haired, green-eyed, pigment-challeneged rug rats, I'll bring it over and you can add it to your scrapbook, right before you start cooking me dinner. I like vegetarian lasagna with cottage cheese instead of ricotta."
"Gwen?"
"And don't forget the mushrooms. Garlic bread, too, please. That is, as long as your vampire lover doesn't object."
"I want to say thank you," Isobel said. "For ... everything."
"No," Gwen said. "Thank you for the delicious dinner. I can almost taste the baklava you and Darth Vader will be making for dessert. Something tells me you're gonna have to look that one up, though. ~ Kelly Creagh

The 'Love Undercover' series features two cops, a street rat, and a construction worker as the lead heroes. ~ Lori Foster

What do you think? This ought to be the right kind of place for tough guy like you. Garbage cans. Rats galore. Plenty of cat-bums to gang around with. So scram,' she said, dropping him…
'...I told you. We just met by the river one day: that's all. Independents, both of us. We never made each other any promises. We never -' she said, and her voice collapsed, a tic, an invalid whiteness seized her face. The car had paused for a traffic light. Then she had the door open, she was running down the street; and I ran after her.
...she shuddered, she had to grip my arm to stand up: 'Oh, Jesus God. We did belong to each other. He was mine.' Then I made her a promise, I said I'd come back and find her cat. 'I'll take care of him, too. I promise.'
She smiled: that cheerless new pinch of a smile. 'But what about me?' she said, whispered, and shivered again. 'I'm very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what's yours until you're thrown it away. The mean reds, they're nothing... ~ Truman Capote

In an Empire where rats ruled, he was the king of the rats. ~ Agatha Christie

didn't talk soothingly to the rat, or stroke her, but firmly grabbed her behind the neck, mimicking a playful nip, and then ran his fingers up and down her rib cage, tickling her. She squirmed briefly, but stopped when he turned her over and tickled her belly. (Like humans, rats have "tickle-skin.") That was when she began to laugh, calls that we heard through the bat detector as quick, high-pitched chirps, and saw on the computer monitor in a sonogram rendition as a vertical series of wavy lines. Compared to a sonogram of various kinds of human laughs, a rat's chirps may be closest to a giggle. "There, she's laughing already," Panksepp said, tickling her some more. "Chup, chup, chup," I wrote in my notebook, trying to approximate the bat-detector's translation of her rat laughter. When Panksepp stopped tickling, she jumped up and bunny-hopped around the bin, while making more of her laughing play-chirps. ~ Virginia Morell

Scientists at the University of Georgia recently discovered that rats are self-aware and capable of something like introspection - complex ~ Virginia Morell

Cats aren't as friendly as they appear: fur, teeth, instinct, selfishness and cunning. Essentially they're just big rats. ~ Richard House

Well, hello, Peter," said Lupin pleasantly, as though rats frequently erupted into old school friends around him. "Long time, no see. ~ J.K. Rowling

The rats had gnawed a hole through the bottom panel. At least he assumed it was rats. Of course it was. What else could it be? For a moment, he conjured up an assortment of Lovecraftian creatures crouching on their haunches, waiting patiently in the dark just beyond the door, waiting to devour him like a side of fresh beef. He quickly held his imagination in check. ~ Gary Val Tenuta

Use when you're piping the virus into the rats, ~ Seanan McGuire

Rat is a lot like duck, except with a wonderfully nutty flavor. ~ Cody Lundin

To a rat, a small hole is like a door. ~ Helena

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly. ~ Roger Ebert

Can you understand what the rats are saying?"
"No. But I can kill them."
"Why?"
"Because they are never satisfied. They are like bad politicians and imperialists and rich people."
"How?"
"They eat up property. They eat up everything in sight. And one day when they are very hungry they will eat us up. ~ Ben Okri

Whatever the hell was going on with this guy, he reminded Harley of a rat. Harley hated rats. It made him want to whack the dude in the face with a bat. ~ Amy Cook

Watch-see, Holy One, my grave-rats will kill-kill all dead-things. We show-tell Fester-rats how to fight. Show-tell why Fester-rats should stay true to Horned One. ~ C.L. Werner

God, I swear I've never seen a more
nervous bunch of people. Like a bunch of rats in a science lab. ~ Feather Stone

Anyone who thinks cryptozoology is the study of the impossible has never really taken a very good look at the so-called "natural world." Once you get past the megamouth sharks, naked mole rats, and spotted hyenas, then the basilisks, dragons, and cuckoos just don't seem that unreasonable. Unpleasant, yes, but unreasonable? Not really. ~ Seanan McGuire

Traditionally, psychology has been the study of two populations: university freshmen and white rats. ~ Paul Bloom

Taggle, meanwhile, made himself popular, killing rats and bringing a rabbit into camp every evening, preening in the praise - silently, thank god, though at night, he recounted choice bits to Kate: "Rye Baro says I am a princeling; he split the leg bone for me so that I could eat the marrow. They love me. And I'm sure they'll keep you, too."
Mira, she thought, and treasured it each time she heard it, They must keep me. Family. ~ Erin Bow

On average, animals that eat 30 percent fewer calories live 30 percent longer. This has been amply demonstrated with yeast cells, worms, insects, mice and rats, dogs and cats, and now primates. In fact, it is the only method that is universally accepted by scientists to alter the life span of all animals that have been tested so far. ~ Michio Kaku

Were not people but cartoon mice and rats and barnyard animals, human-sized, and celebrating - began to sing songs from Disney cartoons. Fat Charlie knew that they wanted him to join in with them. Even asleep he could feel himself panicking at the simple idea of having to sing in public, his limbs becoming numb, his lips prickling. I ~ Neil Gaiman

I'm fascinated by the narrative of geology, and I'm a veritable pack rat of a collector on the road. I keep a rock hammer in my car. ~ Marianne Wiggins

To achieve the mood of a warrior is not a simple matter. It is a revolution. To regard the lion and the water rats and our fellow men as equals is a magnificent act of a warrior's spirit. It takes power to do that. ~ Carlos Castaneda

Every day you feel like you can't control the forces affecting your fate-your job,the government,your addiction,your depression,your money. So you stage micro-revolts. You customise your ringtone,you paint your room,you collect stamps. You choose.
Choices,even small ones,can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness,but you can't stop there. You must fight back your behavoir and learn to fail with pride. Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life. Besides death your destiny is not inescapable.
You are not so smart,but you are smarter than dogs and rats.
Don't give in yet. ~ David McRaney

I've sat looking down into a volcano that could blow at any moment; I've helped catch a shark and several rattlesnakes; I let a tarantula walk across my hand, and I ate rat soup. ~ Alan Alda

I'm a phallus in pigtails, and there's blood on my nose, and my tissue is rotting where the rats chew my bones. And my eye sockets empty, see nothing but pain, I keep having this brainstorm about twelve times a day. ~ David Bowie

Humans. Rats have bigger hearts. Roaches have kinder souls. Flies have- ~ Katherine Applegate

Few chemicals confer maleness, but many take it away. Which, if any, are responsible for our own troubles is hard to say.

The Pill changed men's lives in more ways than one. It caused reproductive hormones to leak into tap water and has been blamed both for the sex changes in freshwater fish and for the drop in our own sperm count. The jury is still out on the issue, but other hormones have had a disastrous effect. A drug called diethylstilbestrol was once thought - in error - to prevent miscarriage. Five million mothers took it and for a time it was even used as a chicken food supplement. A third of the boys exposed to the drug in the womb suffer from small testes or a reduced penis. In rats, the chemical causes prostate and testicular cancer (although there is as yet no sign of those problems in ourselves).
To give a powerful steroid to pregnant women was at best unwise, but the effects of other chemicals were harder to foresee. The 1950s saw a wonderful new chemical treatment for banana pests. Soon the substance was much used. Twenty years later the workers noticed something odd: they had almost no children. Their sperm count had dropped by five hundred times. ~ Steve Jones

The Rats had a fine goalie, Big Ann, a lady dragon who fearlessly stretched herself to the limit anytime she blocked the ball. ~ J.M.K. Walkow

The last time I saw Collin was in 1917, at the foot of Mort-Homme.

Before the great slaughter, Collin'd been an avid angler. On that day, he was standing at the hole, watching maggots swarm among blow flies on two boys that we couldn't retrieve for burial without putting our own lives at risk.

And there, at the loop hole, he thought of his bamboo rods, his flies and the new reel he hadn't even tried out yet.

Collin was imaging himself on the riverbank, wine cooling in the current his stash of worms in a little metal box and a maggot on his hook, writhing like… Holy shit. Were the corpses getting to him?

Collin. The poor guy didn't even have time to sort out his thoughts.

In that split second, he was turned into a slab of bloody meat. A white hot hook drilled right through him and churned through his guts, which spilled out of a hole in his belly.

He was cleared out of the first aid station. The major did triage. Stomach wounds weren't worth the trouble. There were all going to die anyway, and besides, he wasn't equipped to deal with them.

Behind the aid station, next to a pile of wood crosses, there was a heap of body parts and shapeless, oozing human debris laid out on stretchers, stirred only be passing rats and clusters of large white maggots.

But on their last run, the stretcher bearers carried him out after all… Old Collin was still alive.

From the aid station to the ambu ~ Jacques Tardi

Pounce had it easier than any of us. No one noticed a black cat in the street. He stopped here and there to sniff aught of interest. Wherever our Rat stopped, Pounce was there, close enough to see up the Rat's nose. I was so proud. Now there was a proper god, making himself useful!
Since my thought might be deemed blasphemy, I said silent prayers to the Goddess and to Mithros. I begged forgiveness and asked them not to misunderstand. Since I wasn't blasted where I stood, I guess they forgave me, or they hadn't heard my blasphemy. ~ Tamora Pierce

Goodwill to all.' I know it's techinically 'goodwill to all men,' but in my mind, I drop the 'men' because that feels segregationist/elitist/sexist/generally bad ist. Goodwill shouldn't be just for men. It should also apply to women and children, and all animals, even the yucky ones like subway rats. I'd even extend the goodwill not just to living creatures but to the dearly departed, and if we include them, we might as well include the undead, those supposedly mythic beings like vampires, and if they're in, then so are elves, fairies, and gnomes. Heck, since we're already being so generous in our big group hug, why not also embrace those supposedly inanimate objects like dolls and stuffed animals. I'm sure Santa would agree. 'Goodwill to all. ~ Rachel Cohn

Ersken gathered the dice, put them in the cup they had used for play, and tucked it inside one bound Rat's shirt.
"Let that be a lesson to you not to gamble," he told the Rat soberly. "The trickster asks you pay for any luck you may have, one way or another."
"Bless the boy, he's a priest with it," one of the Goddess warriors said with a grin. "After this, laddie, what's say I take you home and rub some of that off yez?"
Ersken actually winked at her! "Forgive me, gracious warrior, but my woman would turn me into something unnatural if I took you up on your kind offer," he replied as if he truly regretted it. "She's a mage and I'd best stay devoted. ~ Tamora Pierce

we're thieves, we're rats. We know when to fight and when to run. ~ Victoria Aveyard

Dogs (like rats) are multitalented but they are also not very smart the way humans are. A recent book, devoted to the intelligence of dogs, is 250+ pages long (Stanley Coren, The Intelligence of Dogs: A Guide to the Thoughts, Emotions, and Inner Lives of Our Canine Companions, 1994). Interestingly, despite careful qualifications by Coren regarding definitions, the ranking of breeds by intelligence literally made newspaper headlines. We are obviously fascinated by the notion that dogs - or at least certain breeds of dog - might, just might, be really, really smart. It all makes as much sense as evaluating humans on our ability to sniff for bombs or echo-locate. ~ Jean Donaldson

You can look at the world from a mountain or from a rat hole! Most people do the second! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

And who came up with the animals for these euphemisms, anyway? Why bat shit? Why not cow shit or grasshopper shit? And why don't we give a rat's ass as opposed to a hamster's ass? ~ Darynda Jones

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive. ~ Frances Farmer

We do not need to burn down the house to kill the rats ~ Herbert Hoover

The more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed, till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or silk membrane, shoed the weight it held in sags. So when later he would fly high over the old craters on the plain, coaly bubbles of the underworld, dangerous red everywhere from the sun, and then coats of snow on the peak of the cones - gliding like a Satan - well, it was here the old priests, before the Spaniards, waited for Aldebaran to come into the middle of heaven to tell them whether or not life would go on for another cycle, and when they received their astronomical sign built their new fire inside the split and emptied chest of a human sacrifice. And also, hereabouts, worshipers disguised as gods and as gods in the disguise of birds, jumped from platforms fixed on long poles, and glided as they spun by the ropes - feathered serpents, and eagles too, the voladores, or fliers. There still are such plummeters, in market places, as there seem to be remnants or conversions or equivalents of all the old things. Instead of racks or pyramids of skulls still in their hair and raining down scraps of flesh there are corpses of dogs, rats, horses, asses, by the roads; the bones dug out of the rented graves are thrown on a pile when the lease is up; and there are the coffins looking like such a rough joke on the female form, sold in the open shops, bl ~ Saul Bellow

I pull his hand up to my chest. "It's okay. Some of my best friends are in the mob. It must be really tough with your husband in prison."
"You THINK?" He pulls away, as if I've been insensitive, picks up a stone and throws it at a crow walking around in the grass.
As the crow screeches bloody murder and takes flight, escaping unscathed, Joshua darts in front of me, hits Tiger in the nuts and calls him a bitch.
Pulling Joshua back to my right, I glare down at him asking- WHAT did you CALL HIM?
"A BITCH."
"He's not a bitch."
"YES HE IS."
Tiger, coming to the rescue, kneels and places his hand on Joshua's shoulder. "Sorry little buddy. I didn't mean to make you go all APE shit. You like those little flying RATS."
Joshua shakes his finger at him. "THEY'RE NOT RATS... YOU BITCH."
As I start to give Joshua a lecture, Tiger stands up and stops me. "It's okay," he said. "Believe it or not- he's not the first to call me a bitch." Taking Joshua's free hand, he walks on his other side, while Joshua glares up at him with distrust. "Bitch isn't a word that you should be using. Not at your AGE."
"That's right," I agreed. "When you get older, you can call your girlfriend a bitch, but only in bed."
Joshua giggles. ~ Giorge Leedy

I'm not scared of animals, except for rats. I'll break down in tears if I see a rat! ~ Jeremy Irvine

After what happened when my last - and if I'm being completely honest, my only - real relationship imploded, my focus needs to be on my career. Sex and marriage and a family and all that can fall into place after I'm a top fund manager. Sometime in the mid-nineties, perhaps.
But the eighties? The eighties are all about getting ahead in the rat race.
And I am determined to be at the front of the pack.
Of rats. ~ Karen Grey

I'm engaged in the dance of the ages and the search for a song to go with it. Though Templeton's A Veritable Smorgasbord is a well-deserving classic, it's a stanza too short for my morphing existence. So I write my own. ~ Chila Woychik

Just a rat, she repeated to herself. After all, there were rats in the palace. Human and otherwise. Could be worse. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

You dirty rat... ~ James Cagney

Yeah, I know what "off the horse" means. I just can't remember how we got to the point where I'm defending myself against the imaginary accusations of a man who gives hairless rats to neighborhood children, and who apparently trusts the nonexistent squirrel junkies in the attic. ~ Jenny Lawson

That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat ... When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Afrikaner women are lower than rats, closer related to plants, just fit enough to be raped in an act of genus preservation. ~ Nadine Gordimer

At every level, from the microcellular to the psychological, exercise not only wards off the ill effects of chronic stress; it can also reverse them. Studies show that if researchers exercise rats that have been chronically stressed, that activity makes the hippocampus grow back to its preshriveled state. The mechanisms by which exercise changes how we think and feel are so much more effective than donuts, medicines, and wine. When you say you feel less stressed out after you go for a swim, or even a fast walk, you are. ~ John Ratey

Rats have a sense of humor. Rats, in fact think the world is very funny. And they are right, dear reader. They are right. ~ Kate DiCamillo

A major push is under way to figure out the molecular basis of those "critical" or "sensitive" periods, to figure out how the brain changes as certain learning abilities come and go. In some, if not all, of those mammals that have the alternating stripes in the visual cortex known as ocular dominance columns, those columns can be adjusted early in development, but not in adulthood. A juvenile monkey that has one eye covered for an extended period of time can gradually readjust its brain wiring to favor the open eye; an adult monkey cannot adjust its wiring. At the end of a critical period, a set of sticky sugar-protein hybrids known as proteoglycans condenses into a tight net around the dendrites and cell bodies of some of the relevant neurons, and in so doing those proteoglycans appear to impede axons that would otherwise be wriggling around as part of the process of readjusting the ocular dominance columns; no wriggling, no learning. In a 2002 study with rats, Italian neuroscientist Tommaso Pizzorusso and his colleagues dissolved the excess proteoglycans with an antiproteoglycan enzyme known as "chABC," and in so doing managed to reopen the critical period. After the chABC treatment, even adult rats could recalibrate their ocular dominance columns. ChABC probably won't help us learn second languages anytime soon, but its antiproteoglycan function may have important medical implications in the not-too-distant future. Another 2002 study, also with rats, showed that chABC can ~ Gary F. Marcus

Why are scientists now using lawyers in laboratory experiments instead of rats? Three reasons: (1) lawyers are more plentiful than rats, (2) there is no danger the scientists will become attached to the lawyers, and (3) there are some things rats just won't do. ~ Gerry Spence

It will be impossible to catch all the rats, my love," he says. His hand brushes against mine. "Sooner or later, one will squeeze through the cracks. You need to be more careful. ~ Marie Lu

So now you go into the next chamber, where the lights are off, it's quiet and calm, and it smells like home. You love it here, it's like a spa for rats. In this context, when the researcher zaps your top NAc, the same thing happens - approach behaviors. But this is where it gets crazy: When the researcher zaps your bottom NAc . . . approach behaviors! In a safe, relaxing environment, almost the entire NAc activates approach motivation! ~ Emily Nagoski

I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones. ~ T. S. Eliot

I hate rats. I had a pet rat to try and overcome it. I even gave him mouth-to mouth resuscitation when he had a heart attack. But I couldn't conquer it. ~ Sam Taylor-Wood

I am naive. I make mistakes - But I don't give a rat's arse how I am perceived! ~ Shirley Manson

Panksepp is emphatic on this point, arguing that his neural studies as well as those of his colleagues show that the prime, fundamental emotions of humans and all mammals do not emerge from the cerebral cortex, as was commonly believed in the twentieth century and as some leading neuroscientists still claim, but come from deep, ancient brain structures, including the hypothalamus and amygdala. It is why, he notes, that "drugs used to treat emotional and psychiatric disorders in humans were first developed and found effective in animals - rats and mice. This kind of research would obviously have no value if animals were incapable of experiencing these emotional states, or if we did not share them. ~ Virginia Morell

Rat race is the perfect name for it,' she said. 'We're always going and going and going, and never asking where. Did you ever hear of having more than you wanted? So that you couldn't want anything else and then started looking for something else to want? It seems like we're always searching for something to satisfy is, and never finding it. Maybe if we could lose our cool we would. ~ S.E. Hinton

GIANTS RATS- I Slap all my enemies in the face! And shatter the teeth of the wicked, in the name of Jesus, flee toothless into the bush! ~ Ademola Adejumo

I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She's clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and manipulative as she. I want to be that way at the restaurants I visit, as I'm walking to my car, with certain friends who might understand.
The actress has played her part well; she's made me want to emulate her base desires if only for a while. Does that make me impressionable, a fool, or someone who will recognize the deepest secrets of her heart?
I fight hard to stay young - to keep the lines from further etching my face and hands and breasts, presumably to trick the world into believing I am young.
I'm an actress playing a part. I'm afraid to tell the truth. I fear losing those younger or becoming those older. In the presence of youth, a sort of unseen age-osmosis occurs within me. The years drop away and I don't want to leave. It's utterly selfish but I don't care. After all, I'm no older than they - I've just been so longer. I was nineteen only yesterday and they don't retire nineteen-year-old actresses. ~ Chila Woychik

How could you be from the ghetto and be a rat? ~ Suge Knight

Schools are not exam factories for the rat race. ~ Johann Lamont

You have five minutes to call someone, anyone, I don't care who, and order me the finest blend of coffee that rat hole town has, and a dozen beers. If it's not sitting on this table ... " a slender finger pointed furiously at the table in question," ... in one hour, you die" - Faith telling Jacob ~ Lora Leigh

Books turn out to be pretty durable if they're kept away from damp and rats. They can last hundreds of years, easy. Reading is another way we survive. It helps to know where we came from, how we got here. And most of all, for me, even thought these low and empty islands are all I have ever known, when I open the front cover of a new book, it's like a door, and I can travel far away in place and time. ~ C.A. Fletcher

While the cat's away, you may find the rats getting damned uppity. ~ Simon R. Green

My only regret is that I'm going before that rat, Robespierre! [to his executioner] Don't forget to show my head to the people; it's well worth seeing. ~ Georges Danton

Gone, at least for the moment, was his view of the Holy One as a man swatting flies or trapping rats in the stable or flying into a temper as savage as any Assyrian king's. Gone too was the notion of the Holy One keeping score so exactingly that not even the angels could escape the severest penalties. In place of all this, at least for as long as it took him to go back into the house, he thought about how the Holy One, blessed be he, wishes the world and its creatures nothing but well. He thought also how, though never condoning the shadows that dwell in the human heart, he is forever dispatching angels of light to deal with them mercifully. ~ Frederick Buechner

But I gotta tell yeh, I thought you two'd value yer friend more'n broomsticks or rats. Tha's all. ~ J.K. Rowling

Rats. Rats, mice, and rodents. ~ Jean Ferris

If you want to reduce the rats, use the cats! If you want to reduce the fools, use the books! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I distrust the perpetually busy, always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters. ~ Mark Slouka

Don't cluster tasks on your way. Some tasks would definitely have to be postponed to the next day. You can't do all things in one day. You can't chase two rabbits at the same time. Both will escape. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

I know more about Emily Bronte than anyone I know. I know enough about her family to have been a part. I've walked with her on her damp luscious lonely moors, watched her strain to write on miniscule scraps of paper, seen her hide her works from prying eyes.
I've brooded alongside her and participated in her taciturnity. Before her death at the ripe old age of 30, I nursed her from the things that ultimately killed her: tuberculosis with a side order of Victorian thinking. ~ Chila Woychik

Dear Miss Tremor. You are smart and kind and pretty. I think you have really excellent stuff under your clothes and I would like to see it, please. Let's go on a date and get married and you can be my rodent queen in my castle in the sewer. Love always and forever, --Mouse. P.S. I am sorry my rats ate some of your candy. ~ Gail Simone

No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all. ~ Megan Abbott

If you feel dirty, insignificant or unloved, then rats are a good role model. They exist without permission, they have no respect for the hierarchy of society, and they have sex 50 times a day. ~ Banksy

We stood up on two legs
And raised our heads above golden grass
He was there

We sharpened stone and steel
Used tools to harvest grass, beast and brother
He was there

We clustered together
In brick and mud swarming with rats and plague
He was there

We built nations and mistrust
Our fingers hovered over the red button
He smiled

Still we build
To rise above the golden grass
Away from the reach of his scythe

When he will harvest no more ~ Tim Seeley

Guinea pigs are practically synonymous with experiments. Lab rats have become the workhorses of modern medicine. Genetics owes a huge debt to the humble fruit fly. There's almost no branch of the life sciences, in fact, that hasn't leaned heavily on one animal or another. ~ Sam Kean

When Anderson walks into a room, you can hear a rat pissing on cotton. ~ Chael Sonnen

every one of us "Who Fly the NOT Too Friendly Skies" Are Now Exposed to Large and Toxic Doses of Radiation by Airport Scanners That Are Not Even Proven Safe for Use on Lab Rats! ~ Erica Wolf

The anarch nurtures no expectations. He stakes on no one but himself. Basically, people remain pied pipers, whatever melodies they play to introduce themselves. And as for the rats - that is a chapter unto itself. ~ Ernst Junger

They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals - but which, in its own time, arose not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God's actual locus (or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying about the chances for mercy that year. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Every once in a bestseller list, you come across a truly exceptional craftsman, a wordsmith so adept at cutting, shaping, and honing strings of words that you find yourself holding your breath while those words pass from page to eye to brain. You know the feeling: you inhale, hold it, then slowly let it out, like one about to take down a bull moose with a Winchester .30-06. You force your mind to the task, scope out the area, take penetrating aim, and ... read.
But instead of dropping the quarry, you find you've become the hunted, the target. The projectile has somehow boomeranged and with its heat-sensing abilities (you have raised a sweat) darts straight towards you. Duck! And turn the page lest it drill between your eyes. ~ Chila Woychik

He's not the only one who's got people to worry about," Rachel said. "I have a family. We
all do."
"Not me," Tobias said softly. He smiled his sad, crooked smile. "It's true. No one gives a rat's
rear about me."
"I do," Rachel said. ~ K.A. Applegate

One day I'll own my own house, but I won't forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I'll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house.

Some days after dinner, guests and I will sit in front of a fire. Floorboards will squeak upstairs. The attic grumbling.
Rats? they'll ask.
Bums, I'll say, and I'll be happy. ~ Sandra Cisneros

There's a psychologist called Mary & Diamond who at Brooklyn in California, in the 80s studied rats. And they took rats at different ages. Newborns, some of whom they deliberately brain damaged, adult, middle-aged, elderly rats. And they exposed these rats to different levels of environmental stimulation, better food, more playmates, toys to play with and so on.

They found out a couple of months later that the rats, at any age, including the brain-damaged rats, who had the better stimulation, they were smarter. But in the autopsy then they also found that in the front part of their brain they had larger nerve-cells with more connections with other nerve-cells and richer blood supply. In other words that environmental stimulation actually caused a change in the state of the brain, even in the older rats.

And that's called neuroplasticity. The capacity of the brain to develop new circuits. So whether it comes to ADHD, addiction, depression or other childhood disorders or any other issue with adults as well, if we recognize them not as ingrained, genetically-determined diseases, but as problems of development, then the question becomes very different. Then the question becomes not just "how do we treat the symptoms?" (and addiction itself is a symptom, depression is a symptom), but "how do we help people develop out of these conditions?"

In other words, it is not a medical question, purely, but a developmental question. And development always ~ Gabor Mate

Mice and any rodentia. Guinea pigs. Even rabbits, I can't stand. Rabbits are cousins to rats. It's a class thing. If you had to grow up with rats scampering in your backyard, because the city services were cut in half and the population in your neighborhood doubled, then that also is going to mean that the flora and fauna are going to grow as well. So that's a part of it. That's why I can't go to Hindu countries where they respect rats and mice, and I can't go camping. ~ Sandra Cisneros

Happier than a terrier in a barrel full of rats ~ Terry Pratchett

Everywhere in science the talk is of winners, patents, pressures, money, no money, the rat race, the lot; things that are so completely alien ... that I no longer know whether I can be classified as a modern scientist or as an example of a beast on the way to extinction. ~ June Goodfield

The Net's interactivity gives us powerful new tools for finding information, expressing ourselves, and conversing with others. It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment. ~ Nicholas Carr

You whining coward of a vampire who prowls the night killing alley cats and rats and staring for hours at candles as if they were people and standing in the rain like a zombie until your clothes are drenched and you smell like old wardrobe trunks in attics and have the look of a baffled idiot at the zoo. ~ Anne Rice

The Egyptians had the locusts and in the Middle Ages there was the Black Death with the rats, but tourists are the plague of our century and we'll not survive this one. ~ Richard Conniff

The walls were chipped and needed paint. The windows were mostly okay but one pane was blocked with cardboard. There were fleas the exterminator couldn't kill and rats that scrabbled in the walls and mice who left droppings like a cocked snook and roaches that thrived on insecticide, even the illegal kinds. ~ John Brunner

Mickey Cohen: New York, its like being a rat in a maze, everyone living on top of each other, but out here, I can breathe. I love Los Angeles. ~ Mickey Cohen

She glanced at his handsome profile. It would be a long time before she forgot anything that happened tonight. But she had to pretend, for the sake of the Librus team--her friends--that everything was hunky dory. That she didn't give a rat's ass about Byrn. That his man-whoring didn't bother her in the least.
That she didn't love him like whoa. ~ Kendall Grey

Beware, Underlanders, time hangs by a thread.
The hunters are hunted, white water runs red.
The Gnawers will strike to extinguish the rest.
The hope of the hopeless resides in a quest.
An Overland warrior, a son of the sun,
May bring us back light, he may bring us back none.
But gather your neighbors and follow his call
Or rats will most surely devour us all.
Two over, two under, of royal descent,
Two flyers, two crawlers, two spinners assent.
One gnawer beside and one lost up ahead.
And eight will be left when we count up the dead.
The last who will die must decide where he stands.
The fate of the eight is contained in his hands.
So bid him take care, bid him look where he leaps,
As life may be death and death life again reaps. ~ Suzanne Collins