Rodents Quotes

Although you should respect venomous snakes and approach them with caution, most snakes you encounter in an urban environment are harmless and beneficial because they eat insects, mice and other rodents. ~ Robert Pierce

There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile block of eastern American forest holds almost 300,000 mammals - 220,000 mice and other small rodents, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30 foxes, and 5 black bears. ~ Bill Bryson

Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a number of wild cats are native to the area.) I don't think this is accurate. It is certainly not the whole story. Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function. ~ William S. Burroughs

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

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion. ~ Umberto Eco

Masson disliked and respected the ferocious little rodents, for he knew the danger that lurked in their flashing, needle-sharp fangs; ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Walter had never liked cats. They'd seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals' lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs. He'd never seen anything in a cat's face but simpering incuriosity and self-interest; you only had to tease one with a mouse-toy to see where it's true heart lay ... cats were all about using people ~ Jonathan Franzen

Canada is the only country founded on the relentless pursuit of the rodent. ~ Preston Manning

When collapse is imminent, the little rodents flee. ~ Pliny The Elder

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer... I would rather not dwell upon him at all, but I cannot help it - he is surging up from under my pen. Today one does not hear much about him; and this is good, for it proves that I was right in resisting his evil spell, right in experiencing a creepy chill down my spine whenever this or that new book of his touched my hand. The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates. Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents. Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth.

I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The Americas were a great laboratory of evolutionary experimentation, a place where animals and plants unknown in Africa and Asia had evolved and thrived. But no longer. Within 2,000 years of the Sapiens' arrival, most of these unique species were gone. According to current estimates, within that short interval, North America lost thirty-four out of its forty-seven genera of large mammals. South America lost fifty out of sixty. The sabre-tooth cats, after flourishing for more than 30 million years, disappeared, and so did the giant ground sloths, the oversized lions, native American horses, native American camels, the giant rodents and the mammoths. Thousands of species of smaller mammals, reptiles, birds and even insects and parasites also became extinct (when the mammoths died out, all species of mammoth ticks followed them to oblivion). ~ Yuval Noah Harari

I had thirty-nine typed pages and a contract stating I would send the completed manuscript in by February 1, 2002. I knew where I wanted the novel to go, but I couldn't seem to shove it past page 39. I couldn't find the point of view I needed to examine the life and motives of a man who wanted to conquer the world. I did the usual: sacrificed small rodents to the moon, offered my soul to demons in exchange for inspiration, did some research. Nobody wanted the rodents or my soul, and the research into ancient conquerors seemed barren. Finally, out of the blue, a young girl stepped into my head, opened her mouth and told me where that part of the story began. ~ Patricia A. McKillip

Medieval illustrations show people in every other human activity-making love and dying, sleeping and eating, in bed and in the bath, praying, hunting, dancing, plowing, in games and in combat, trading, traveling, reading and writing - yet so rarely with children as to raise the question: Why not? Maternal love, like sex, is generally considered too innate to be eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed. Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product. A child was born and died and another took its place. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

I do not knowingly kill any living thing - including insects or rodents - and I thank my food for sustaining me. ~ Joan Jett

The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents. ~ Margaret Halsey

I mean honestly, who just sits around in a house with a bunch of short guys waiting for their prince to come? So your mom is a bitch and wants to kill you because her mirror told her to? Cry me a river why don't you? Your big plan is sitting around cleaning house waiting for the other shoe to drop? And speaking of shoes, everyone has been picked on by mean girls. You do not wait for some old lady to pop in and transmogrify some innocent rodents just so you can sneak in to a dance under false pretenses. And let's say you do sneak in. For the love of all that is holy take your mask off and look the guy in the face and say. "Hi, I'm Cindy from down the street, I have this thing at midnight. Can we do coffee later?" This nonsense with a shoe and searching the entire village for one girl, it's crap. ~ John Goode

Comen out, leetle rodents," the human called in a language that the companions could not understand. The wizard reiterated the request in another tongue, then in drow, and then in two more unknown tongues, and then in svirfneblin. He continued on for many minutes, ~ R.A. Salvatore

Make mine a weasel, I said to the crowd of mostly rodents and lawyers. ~ Jarod Kintz

...of eighteen kittens reared in the company of rodents, only three became rodent-killers later on. The other fifteen could not be trained to kill later by seeing other cats killing. For them the rodents had become 'family' and were no longer 'prey'. Even the three killers would not attack rodents of the same species as the one with which they were reared. ~ Desmond Morris

Sandy: Carl I want you to kill all the gophers on the golf course.
Carl Spackler: Correct me if I'm wrong Sandy, but if I kill all the golfers they'll lock me up and throw away the key.
Sandy: Not golfers, you great fool. Gophers. The little brown, furry rodents.
Carl Spackler: We can do that. We don't even need a reason. ~ Carl Spackler

Let's find someplace where there aren't any dead people, insects, or rodents. For that matter, someplace that's big enough to accommodate both of us without crimping any internal organs. (Shahara)
Picky, picky, picky. (Syn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Figure 14: Garter snakes hunt during the day and sleep at night in common dens with fellow garters. They eat anything they can overpower, including small rodents, birds, earthworms, and frogs. ~ Janet Evans

Mystic

The air is a mill of hooks -
Questions without answer,
Glittering and drunk as flies
Whose kiss stings unbearably
In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.

I remember
The dead smell of sun on wood cabins,
The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets.
Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?
Once one has been seized up

Without a part left over,
Not a toe, not a finger, and used,
Used utterly, in the sun's conflagrations, the stains
That lengthen from ancient cathedrals
What is the remedy?

The pill of the Communion tablet,
The walking beside still water? Memory?
Or picking up the bright pieces
of Christ in the faces of rodents,
The tame flower- nibblers, the ones

Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable -
The humpback in his small, washed cottage
Under the spokes of the clematis.
Is there no great love, only tenderness?
Does the sea

Remember the walker upon it?
Meaning leaks from the molecules.
The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats,
The children leap in their cots.
The sun blooms, it is a geranium.

The heart has not stopped. ~ Sylvia Plath

Quootla had a suffix, -utl, that could be glued to the end of anything - nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, small rodents - and meant the word itself plus its opposite, simultaneously. It didn't always translate into Goreddi. Time/no-time almost made sense; blue/orange or fall/rise or dog/whatever-the-opposite-of-dog-is were perfectly intelligible in Quootla but boggling to nearly everyone else. ~ Rachel Hartman

I'm not a big-game hunter. I've made that very clear. I've always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will. ~ Mitt Romney

Human sexual and social behavior shares some similaries with that of rodents, but has some important differences as well. It shows much greater variability and individuality, for example, and is less closely tied to the olfactory system. At present, it is tempting to speculate that those of us with cheatin' hearts might have differences in brain dopamine, vasopressin, or oxytocin signaling when compared to our more faithful friends who have adopted the prairie vole lifestyle. ~ David J. Linden

In obedience to God's Word we should fight to walk in the paths where he has promised his blessings. But when and how they come is God's to decide, not ours. If they delay, we trust the wisdom of our Father's timing, and we wait. In this way joy remains a gift, while we work patiently in the field of obedience and fight against the weeds and the crows and the rodents. Here is where joy will come. Here is where Christ will reveal himself (John 14:21). But that revelation and that joy will come when and how Christ chooses. It will be a gift. ~ John Piper

Behind every wall and every mirror and every vent, I hear sounds: breathing, rustling, footsteps, and murmurs. I try to tell myself it's just mice making their nests behind the barriers, but since when do rodents whisper? ~ A.G. Howard

Well, make up your mind. I don't have all night." Fidelia set her beer on the porch and removed a set of keys from her skirt pocket. She fumbled with the key, trying to release the trigger lock on her pistol.
"Don't do that," Heather warned her. "You've had too much to drink."
Fidelia snorted. "I'm not drunk. I'm in complete control." She tore off the trigger lock.
Bang! The gun fired, ripping into a nearby oak tree.
The women screamed. Jean-Luc winced.
A squirrel plummeted from the tree and landed in the yard with a thud.
Fidelia shrugged. "I meant to do that. Damned rodent's been gnawing on the house. And stealing all the nuts from our pecan tree."
Heather planted her hands on her hips. "Haven't I told you a million times to keep the locks on?"
Fidelia hung her head, looking properly remorseful. "I'll be more careful." She switched on the safety, then shot Jean-Luc a pointed look. "I know how to deal with a scumbag with nuts. ~ Kerrelyn Sparks

I suppose I knew on an intellectual level that graves weren't especially made for getting out of. I mean, you start with a hermetically sealed casket and then you dump six feet of dirt on top of it. Over time the earth gets compacted, which can't make it easy to dig through. So even if you're a very angry and determined zombie, you've kind of got your work cut out for you just escaping from the grave.
Which was, I suppose, why we got hit with an initial wave of zombie bugs, birds and rodents. I bet some people would say if you've never picked undead mosquitoes out of your teeth, you've never lived. Under that definition, I'd be just as happy to have not lived, thanks. ~ C.E. Murphy

You'd make an enemy out of me over a human?" The word "human" might as well have been "rodent. ~ Nalini Singh

Not much goes on in the mind of a squirrel.
Huge portions of what is loosely termed "the squirrel brain" are given over to one thought: food.
The average squirrel cogitation goes something like this: I wonder what there is to eat. ~ Kate DiCamillo

For us hunting wasn't a sport. It was a way to be intimate with nature, that intimacy providing us with wild unprocessed food free from pesticides and hormones and with the bonus of having been produced without the addition of great quantities of fossil fuel. In addition, hunting provided us with an ever scarcer relationship in a world of cities, factory farms, and agribusiness, direct responsibility for taking the lives that sustained us. Lives that even vegans indirectly take as the growing and harvesting of organic produce kills deer, birds, snakes, rodents, and insects. We lived close to the animals we ate. We knew their habits and that knowledge deepened our thanks to them and the land that made them. ~ Ted Kerasote

Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Have you ever noticed that people look like either rodents or birds? And you can classify them that way, like, I definitely have more of a rodent face, but you look like a penguin. ~ Jesse Andrews

The Titans looked on humans the way we might look on gerbils. Some Titans thought humans were kind of cute, though they died awfully quick and didn't serve any purpose. Other Titans thought they were repulsive rodents. Some Titans didn't pay them any attention at all. As for the humans, they mostly just cowered in their caves and scurried around trying not to get stepped on. ~ Rick Riordan

Dolorita Hunsickle says that the chipmunks tell your fortune if you catch them but I never did. She says a chipmunk told her she would grow up to be a famous ballerina and that she would die of consumption unloved in a boardinghouse in Prague. ~ Neil Gaiman

A prince and a witch, willing to kill each other for you," she rasped in her scratchy voice. "If it was me, I'd feel flattered." She watched the rodents disembowel the lizard and lifted her hooded red eyes. "Thankfully I don't have feelings. ~ Soman Chainani

But he might have had a bang on the head!" said Joan. "Poor little boy, he thinks he was a rat!"
"Hmm," said the receptionist, and wrote rodent delusion on a pink slip of paper. ~ Philip Pullman

Cats, I decided, had certain advantages over men. There were loyal without being sycophantic, independent without being absent, and affectionate without being rapacious. That they choke up balls of fur and leave dead rodents at my feet is unfortunate. But it is not grounds for divorce. ~ Betsy Tobin

I'm fairly certain, Captain," she said, "that the more you discover about me, the more you will dislike me. Therefore, let's cut to the chase and acknowledge that we don't like each other. Then we won't have to bother with the in-between part."
She was so bloody frank and practical about the whole thing that Christopher couldn't help but be amused.
"I'm afraid I can't oblige you."
"Why not?"
"Because when you said that just now, I found myself starting to like you."
"You'll recover," she said.
Her decisive tone made him want to smile. "It's getting worse, actually," he told her. "Now I'm absolutely convinced that I like you."
Beatrix gave him a patently skeptical stare. "What about my hedgehog? Do you like her, too?"
Christopher considered that. "Affection for rodents can't be rushed."
"Medusa isn't a rodent. She's an erinaceid. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Opening the fridge door, I found a rat eating the cheese. My dealings with rodents, particularly those tagged verminous, have been few, but generally the pattern has been one of man, the boss, the caretaker of creation, the namer, appearing and the lower orders hitting the road. ~ Tibor Fischer

Redford had read somewhere that cats brought their owners dead birds, rodents, and their own toys because they were trying to teach the stupid humans how to hunt, like they did with their own kittens. From the amount of toys Knievel had brought to him, the cat thought he was absolutely useless. ~ Robin Saxon

The Death of Rats nibbled a bit of the pork pie because when you are the personification of the death of small rodents you have to behave in certain ways. He also piddled on one of the turnips for the same reason, although only metaphorically, because when you are a small skeleton in a black robe there are also some things you technically cannot do. ~ Terry Pratchett

The whispers you hear in your ear that you fear
in the air everywhere,
they are ghosts.

The moans and the groans in the lowest of tones
no one owns or condones,
they are ghosts.

You might deem them gremlins or water or wind,
while others say shadows or rodents or sin.

But oh! I say no!
'Tis not so, child, for lo!
The chills that you feel in a thrill that proves goose
bumps are frightfully real,
they are ghosts! ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Every pellet has a story all its own.
Every pellet has a story all its own.
With its fur and teeth and bones
And one or two stones,
Every pellet has a story all its own.
We shall dissect every pellet with glee.
Perhaps we'll find a rodents knee.
And never shall we tire
In the sacred task that we conspire,
No do our work less perfectly
And those bright flecks at the core,
Which makes our hearts soar,
Shall forever remain the deepest mystery.
- The owlets in the Pelletorium at St. Aegolius ~ Kathryn Lasky

Speciesism is a failure to empathize with those outside one's group. In general, speciesists simply disregard the myriad nonhumans whom humans intentionally hurt and kill. Who cares if millions of mice and rats are vivisected? They're 'only rodents'. What does it matter if billions of chickens live in misery until they die in pain and fear? They're 'just chickens'. They aren't human, so they don't count. Victimizers lack empathy for their victims, but absence of empathy doesn't justify victimization, whether the victims are human or nonhuman. ~ Joan Dunayer

My interpretation of scientific knowledge, for example, was a triviality for physicists like Mach, Boltzmann, Einstein and Bohr. But the ideas of these great thinkers were distorted beyond recognition by the rodents of neopositivism and the competing rodents of the church of 'critical' rationalism. ~ Paul Feyerbend

As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man. ~ Thomas Huxley

Private Eye continued to report that the stench in the Houses of Parliament was just as strong as it had been on the day when the birds flew away and the rodents fled. ~ Stephen Vizinczey

But I know rodents. Also, I believe I was a rodent, but that was only for a little while - I don't remember it clearly and I don't want to discuss it. I think I can handle a possum ~ Cassandra Clare

Hawaii once had a rat problem. Then, somebody hit upon a brilliant solution. import mongooses from India. Mongooses would kill the rats. It worked. Mongooses did kill the rats. Mongooses also killed chickens, young pigs, birds, cats, dogs, and small children. There have been reports of mongooses attacking motorbikes, power lawn mowers, golf carts, and James Michener. in Hawaii now, there are as many mongooses as there once were rats. Hawaii had traded its rat problem for a mongoose problem. Hawaii was determined nothing like that would ever happen again.
How could Leigh-Cheri draw for Gulietta the appropriate analogy between Hawaii's rodents and society at large? Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem. ~ Tom Robbins

I don't like rats any more than the next bloke, but they ain't wicked and cruel like people can be. They're just ratty in their habits. ~ Philip Pullman

His hand sliced through the air in a silencing motion, and he stalked to the window. "Have you seen any rats?"
Her mind spun at the sudden shift of subject. "Rats?"
"Rodents that resemble large mice."
"I know what rats are," she gritted out. "Why?"
"They're spies." He peered through the curtain into the darkness. Thick fog diffused the yellow lamplight, creating an eerie glow on the street below. "Have you seen any?"
Rodent spies? The man might be hot as hell, but he was a loon. As inconspicuously as possible, Cara inched toward the door. "I didn't see any furry little James Bonds. ~ Larissa Ione

I can't cohabitate with rodents." She pauses. That's a lie. I've lived with Loren for nine months, but I draw the line right here. ~ Krista Ritchie

Win and you are the superior being in all the universe; lose, and may the fleas of a million rodents, infect your every orifice. ~ David Feherty

I'm not looking to freak people out - eating rodents or bugs. I don't do that anymore. ~ Anthony Bourdain

The important thing about adventures, thought Mr. Bunnsy, was that they shouldn't be so long as to make you miss mealtimes. ~ Terry Pratchett

Dr. Nicole Martin." Riker felt Myne's eyes boring into him. "She's alive?"
"Apparently." A shiver of hatred slithered up Riker's spine.

Until last week, when he'd seen a newspaper article glorifying the return of the Martin heir, he'd believed only one member of the godforsaken immediate family, Charles, was alive. "After the rest of the Martins were slaughtered in the rebellion, she was sent to Paris to live with her mother's relatives until she was old enough to work in Daedalus's French division as a vampire physiologist."

The mere mention of the infamous Seattle Slave Rebellion made Myne's voice degenerate into gravel. "And she's here now?" Riker nodded at the female in the window. "Right there and all grown up. And if you're done jacking off your dagger, we'll go have a chat with her."

"You think she'll cooperate?" Hell no. She was a Martin, after all, current CEO of the company that had revolutionized vampire slavery and used vampires like lab rodents to advance human medicine. Daedalus went through vampires like a slaughterhouse went through cattle, and Riker doubted the company held to any kind of "humane" standards. "For her sake," Riker said slowly, "I hope so. ~ Larissa Ione

Hamsters. We have other names for them; rats, weasels, rodents, but with their fine, golden fur, round faces and whiskers, what they most look like are hamsters. ~ Craig Alanson

Now, many of us in the Labour Party are conservationists - and we all love the red squirrel. But there is one ginger rodent which we never want to see again - Danny Alexander. ~ Harriet Harman

Perhaps most important for nomads was the belief in the symbiosis that existed between wolf and humans on the steppe. Wolves were an integral part of keeping the balance of nature, ensuring that plagues of rabbits and rodents didn't break out, which in turn protected the all-important pasture for the nomads' herds. ~ Tim Cope

So in the library there are also books containing falsehoods. ..."

"Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the Creator is revealed. And by divine plan, too, there exist also books by wizards, the cabalas of the Jews, the fables of pagan poets, the lies of the infidels. It was the firm and holy conviction of those who founded the abbey and sustained it over the centuries that even in books of falsehood, to the eyes of the sage reader, a pale reflection of the divine wisdom can shine. And therefore the library is a vessel of these, too. But for this very reason, you understand, it cannot be visited by just anyone. And furthermore," the abbot added, as if to apologize for the weakness of this last argument, "a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth. ~ Umberto Eco

Rodents can come across as being quite vacant in the personality stakes. ~ Julian Clary

Your father wasn't a positive influence on you, was he? (Simone) Being the god of nightmares, he wasn't a warm fuzzy bunny. Unless you count Happy Bunny. Amazingly the two of them have a lot in common ... And I have to say that I've developed a fondness for that pissy rodent. (Xypher) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

The workman cut to the left, still laying on his horn, and roared around the drunkenly weaving limousine. He invited the driver of the limo to perform an illegal sex act on himself. To engage in oral congress with various rodents and birds. He articulated his own proposal that all persons of Negro blood return to their native continent. He expressed his sincere belief in the position the limo driver's soul would occupy in the afterlife. He finished by saying that he believed he had met the limodriver's mother in a New Orleans house of prostitution. ~ Stephen King

She left the room, with her black-and-white kitty, Ruff, Elizabeth, Naiad and Persephone- a spotted gray-and-white shorthair- following on her heels in hopes of getting breakfast. As for her other two cats, she knew they must be out hunting rodents and birds rather than waiting to go down to the kitchens with everyone else.
Burr and old Henry, who had climbed with a stiff gait out of his basket, joined the furry entourage, tails wagging and tongues lolling as they descended the stairs. The Scotties were probably asleep in the nursery, happy to wait to see what tidbits the children would sneak them during their breakfast in another hour or two. ~ Tracy Anne Warren