Quotes About Rats

“For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon's surface, and that half the people's right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it's interesting again.”

— Rudy Rucker

“OK," Josh said evenly, "I've seen men made of mud, I guess I can accept spying rats. Do they talk?" he wondered aloud.
Don't be ridiculous," Flamel snapped, "They're rats."
Josh really didn't think it was a ridiculous suggestion.”

— Michael Scott

“I once asked the servants why none of them had blue eyes like my aunts. They replied that only the ladies could afford to buy the blue glass cups in which they kept their eyes at night to make them more blue and beautiful, and furthermore, if we went on asking silly questions, the rats that steal the faces of inquisitive children in order to wear them as masks would come to take us to live in the twilit world between the ceiling and the roof where no one ever dared to go.”

— José Donoso

“With his dripping basket and flip-flapped up the hill. Then a car turned into Cannery Row and Doc drove up to the front of the laboratory. His eyes were red rimmed with fatigue. He moved slowly with tiredness. When the car had stopped, he sat still for a moment to let the road jumps get out of his nerves. Then he climbed out of the car. At his step on the stairs, the rattlesnakes ran out their tongues and listened with their waving forked tongues. The rats scampered madly about the cages. Doc climbed the stairs. He looked in wonder at the sagging door and at the broken window. The weariness seemed to go out of him. He stepped quickly inside. Then he went quickly from room to room, stepping around the broken glass. He bent down”

— John Steinbeck

“How can we scramble away like rats, without honor, without dignity, when everyone must help rebuild the country?”

— Thanhha Lai

“I thought we used to kill rats?" he said, as if he wasn't quite certain anymore.
"Yes, but you see, sir, this is the future," said Maurice.
"Is it?" said Mr. Schlummer. "Really? I always wondered when the future was going to happen. Oh, well. Cats talk now, too? Well done! Got to move with the, mm, the ... things that move, obviously. Wake me up when they bring the tea in.”

— Terry Pratchett

“And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors?”

— Siddhartha Mukherjee

“Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude it, the question "What on earth is he up to now?" will intrude. It lays one's devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, "I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.”

— C.S. Lewis

“Future For cell mates For the gutter rats For those who are looked in on from the outside, and no one else will ever understand.”

— C.L.Stone

“There is a line somewhere in Wozzeck that translates out to, roughly, 'The world is awful.' Yes, I said to myself as I shot across the Bay Bridge not giving a fuck how fast I drove, that sums it up. That is high art: 'The world is awful.' That says it all. This is what we pay composers and painters and the great writers to do: tell us this; from figuring this out, they earn a living. What a masterful, incisive insight. What penetrating intelligence. A rat in a drain ditch could tell you the same thing, were it able to talk. If rats could talk, I'd do anything they said.”

— Philip K. Dick

“If what we're doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad? On the ramp at night, why do we feel the ungainsayable need to get so brutishly drunk? Why did we make the meadow churn and spit? The flies as fat as blackberries, the vermin, the diseases, ach, scheusslich, schmierig-why? Why do rats fetch 5 bread rations per cob? Why did the lunatics, and only the lunatics, seem to like it here? Why, here, do conception and gestation promise not new life but certain death for both woman and child? Ach, why all der Dreck, der Sumpf, der Schleim? Why do we turn the snow brown? Why do we do that? Make the snow look like the shit of angels. Why do we do that?”

— Martin Amis

“Let the cats rule the world; first thing they will do is to increase the number of mousetraps! Let the rats rule the world; first thing they will do is to increase the number of dogs!”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“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

“We could have had a major disaster on our hands."
"Right now the earth could fall off its axis, and I wouldn't give a rats behind."
Michael's gaze skimmed over my bare shoulders, and he reached out to gently pull my jacket around them. "I've known since before we met how it would be between us. But knowing didn't prepare me for you.”

— Myra McEntire

“What tipped the scales was that psychology involved working with rats.”

— Morrie Schwartz.

“Rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes. This proposition is supported by much evidence from research on pigeons, rats, humans, and other animals.”

— Daniel Kahneman

“Rats! Sometimes it's very difficult being a dog ... Especially when it's raining. You're looking forward to a great breakfast ... When it arrives, you're full of joyful anticipation ... Then you see the water rise in your dog dish ... And you watch your pancakes float downstream!”

— Charles M. Schulz

“Without the giants mankind would be alone with the rats and the cockroaches. Worse, perhaps, he would be alone with himself. This fuzzy issue had not occupied the futurologists. They cluckclucked over butter mountains here versus starvation there, and supplied their own recipes. They loved their theories more than the world.”

— Gregory Benford

“I studied neuroscience at the cellular level, so I was looking at learning and memory in the visual cortex of rats. Neuroscience mainly exposed me to a way of thinking - about experimentation, about what you believe to be true and how you could prove it - and how to approach things in a methodical manner.”

— Ze Frank

“Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude characters of their speech.”

— Gene Wolfe

“Yeah, we've heard that before. This time we mean it. We're not going to sit back and let you treat us like rats anymore. We're done.”

— James Dashner

“I'm taking my rats. Those are my friends for the tour. Thelma and Louise. They're so cute.”

— Pink

“I went down to the sewers in London and looked at a campaigning group in London called RATS, Rowers Against Thames Sewage, and I went to Sewage School and hung out with kids learning to make sewage soup and how to clean sewage. And it was great - really good fun.”

— Rose George

“I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.”

— Jerry Spinelli

“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

“I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.”

— Graham Greene

“There are more humans than all of the rabbits on earth. There are more of us than all the wildebeests, than all the rats, than all the mice. We are the most numerous mammal on the planet. But because we're not like rabbits or rats or mice, we have technology, we have a consumptive appetite, we have a global economy.”

— David Suzuki

“All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.”

— Marya Hornbacher

“Rats live on no evil star”

— Anne Sexton

“If you join the rat race - you're in the race of rats.”

— Bertolt Brecht

“Clary wondered how many boyfriends she'd turned into rats by accident.
-Clary to Isabelle, pg.245-”

— Cassandra Clare

“Psychology should be the chief basic science upon which the practices of education depend. It should have supplied education with the information it needs concerning the processes of understanding, learning, and thinking, among other things. One of the difficulties has been that such theory as has been developed has been based primarily upon studies of behavior of rats and pigeons. As someone has said, some of the theory thus developed has been an insult even to the rat.”

— J. P. Guilford

“That such a slave as this should wear a sword,
Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,
Like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwain
Which are too intrinse t' unloose; smooth every passion
That in the natures of their lords rebel,
Being oil to the fire, snow to the colder moods,
Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks
With every gale and vary of their masters
Knowing naught, like dogs, but following.”

— William Shakespeare

“Most rats read. Our frustration is, we cannot hold a pen to write.”

— Suzanne Collins

“And then there was Tick. Brave little Tick, who had flown into the faces of an army of rats to save his baby sister. Tick - who never spoke much. Tick - who shared her food. Tick - who was after all just a roach. Just a roach who had given all the time she had left so that Boots could have more.
Gregor pressed Boots's fingers against his lips and felt scalding tears begin to slide down his cheeks. He hadn't cried, not the whole time he'd been down here, and there had been plenty of bad stuff. But somehow Tick's sacrifice had crushed whatever thin shell remained between him and sorrow.”

— Suzanne Collins

“Nature hav no music; nor would ther be for theeany better melody in the April woods at dawnthan what an old stone-deaf labourer, lying awakeo'night in his comfortless attic, might perchancebe aware of, when the rats run amok in his thatch?”

— Robert Bridges

“I think that humans are also set up to survive. We're not as small as rats, but we make up for that by being intelligent enough to make our own hiding places and to adapt to new habitats, even if they are changing very quickly. We have an enormous population, and can afford to lose billions of people without suffering very much as a species. Indeed, some would say losing five billion people would be good for the planet - I disagree with them, but can't deny that we would do just fine if there were two billion of us or even one billion.”

— Annalee Newitz

“Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.”

— Gunter Grass

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

— Nadine Gordimer

“Based on my time living with rats and mice in Washington, D.C., I have always assumed that animals will escape such fires, since their senses of smell, wariness of such dangers, and ability to move through almost invisible holes is so impressive, but I think that we should not dismiss the possibility that they, also, will be harmed. These reflections do not, of course, rule out burning meat trucks. And they don't mean that when the next slaughterhouse or vivisection lab burns down, I will denounce those who carried out the burning, or that I will feel anything other than joy in my heart ...”

— Bruce Friedrich

“I think doctors have really come up to speed and understand that more women than men die of heart disease. [But] all the research on heart disease has really been based on men, and needs to be updated with research on women - even very early-stage research is done using male rats!”

— Laura Bush

“Failure of success is not race-related; it's not socioeconomics-related; it is really predictable, based on principles that are laid down by God the Creator by which we are supposed to function. If we find them and obey them, success becomes inevitable. That's why I was able to move from rats to 40,000 feet in the air in my own aircraft.”

— Myles Munroe

“It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.”

— Stephen Hawking

“For the first time in six or seven thousand years, many people of goodwill find themselves confused about art. They want to enjoy it because enjoying art is something they expect of themselves as civilized persons, but they're unsure how to do so. They aren't even sure which of the visible objects are art and which are furniture, clothes, hors d'oeuvres, or construction rubble, and whether a pile of dead and decomposing rats is deliberate art or just another pile of decomposing rats.”

— Barbara Holland

“The rats are underneath the piles/ The Jew is underneath the lot.”

— T.S. Eliot

“Squirrels are just rats with good publicity”

— Garrison Wynn

“Ambition is torment enough for an enemy; for it affords as much discontentment in enjoying as in want, making men like poisoned rats, which, when they have tasted of their bane, cannot rest till they drink, and then can much less rest till they die”

— Joseph Hall

“Rats are just Ziploc bags full of disease.”

— Chris Hardwick

“At the bottom of the social heap is the black man in the big-city ghetto. He lives night and day with the rats and the cockroaches and drowns himself with alcohol and anesthetizes himself with dope, to try and forget where and what he is. That Negro has given up all hope. He's the hardest one for us to reach, because he's the deepest in the mud. But when you get him, you've got the best kind of Muslim. I look upon myself as a prime example of this category - as graphic an example as you could find of the salvation of the black man.”

— Malcolm X

“It is a view of God that compensates every thing else, and enables the soul to rest in His bosom. How, when the child in the night screams with terror, hearing sounds that it knows not of, is that child comforted and put to rest? Is it by a philosophical explanation that the sounds were made by the rats in the partition? Is it by imparting entomological knowledge? No; it is by the mother taking the child in her lap, and singing sweetly to it, and rocking it. And the child thinks nothing of the explanation, but only of the mother.”

— Henry Ward Beecher