Mouse Trap Quotes

Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

What you’re seeing now is what I see every day. No matter how far I run, how hard I try to escape you—you’re everywhere I go. You’re everything I see. Loving you is like being trapped in a house of mirrors, little mouse. And I’ve never felt so at home while being so lost inside you.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

It was fine," I said stiffly. "We played Mouse Trap." "Is that what they're calling it these days?" she asked, throwing me a terrible grin. "I have to go give Rachel a quick bath. Feel free to make yourself some cocoa or whatever you like!" She stopped short of adding "...future child-bride of my only son.

No matter how far I run, how hard I try to escape you --you're everywhere I go. You're everything I see. Loving you is like being trapped in a house of mirrors, little mouse. And I've never felt so at home while being so lost inside you.

In baiting a mousetrap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.

One day, you will realize that you are not trapped in a prison," he murmurs roughly. "You are in my church where I am your God, and you are my equal. I'm not a jail, little mouse, I am your sanctuary.

What are you feeling right now?" he asks softly. My breathing escalates. "Confined." "Trapped?" he volleys back. My mouth tightens because while a part of me wants to say yes, the truth is that I don't. I feel... safe. Protected. Treasured. "One day, you will realize that you are not trapped in a prison," he murmurs roughly. "You are in my church where I am your God, and you are my equal. I'm not a jail, little mouse, I am your sanctuary.

I was a mouse trapped in a corner, looking for a crack to flee through but despairing of finding one.

Tell me, baby. What does drowning sound like?” “Like the first breath of air after being trapped underwater. It's a sound of both pain and relief. Of desperation and desire. When you’ve gone so long without oxygen, that first breath is the only thing that makes sense, and your body takes it in without permission.

I’ve just found myself a little mouse, and I won’t stop until I’ve trapped her.

The little country mouse looked at the trap. Then he looked at his cousin. “I think I will go home,” he said. “I’d rather have barley and grain and eat it in peace, than have brown sugar and cheese and eat in fear.” The two mice shook hands. The country mouse happily went back to his home. And there he stayed for the rest of his life.

When you're trapped and terrified, hope is the first thing you lose.

For behind the wooden wainscots of all the old houses in Gloucester, there are little mouse staircases and secret trap-doors; and the mice run from house to house through those long narrow passages; they can run all over the town without going into the streets.

The first thing he noticed was that Las Vegas seemed to have invented a new school of functional architecture, 'The Gilded Mousetrap School' he thought it might be called, whose main purpose was to channel the customer-mouse into the central gambling trap whether he wanted the cheese or not.

When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon. The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains.

Again Mosca felt she was up in the rafters, watching the mice. Little mouse, witless with fear. Running the wrong way. And here she was, just watching. Becoming a part of it by doing nothing.

However, the crowds all the while maintained their mouse-tense hush, their air of urgency. Fear. There was a reek of it everywhere, Mosca realized, in every guarded glance or falsely friendly backslap. A clammy smell, like rotten leaves. And everybody went about their lives in spite of it, because fear was part of their lives.

You grew up soft. Your tender heart would nurse a frightened field mouse rescued from a trap. Would make a splint. You'd try to help but always it would die. You gave them names. You were a friendless child, a barrel-chested, sturdy little thing who played alone. You grew up soft, but still you learned to hide it. Piece by piece. The world's not built for soft and sturdy things. It likes its soft things small and white, defenceless. Princesses in castles. Maidens waiting for the perfect sword. You grew up soft, and piece by wounded piece you built a carapace around your body. Humans are peculiar little things.

But powerless, weaponless, friendless—my hope of escaping was as slender as a mouse trapped in a tiger’s claws.

A Little Fable "Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must ...

I had to set the mouse trap three times before I finally caught the mouse. And that’s because I under-estimated the mouse, I over-estimated the trap, and I under-estimated the fact that I over-estimated myself.

that the doll's house belonged to said: "I will get a doll dressed like a policeman!" BUT the nurse said: "I will set a mouse-trap!" SO that is the story of the two Bad Mice. But they were not so very, very naughty

Never mind gas masks and fallout shelters in the event of biological warfare. Many New Yorkers move from place to place equipped with the essentials of vermin assault weaponry: mouse traps, roach spray, and sticky tapes. In some neighborhoods, it’s a must.

I avoided any leaves and stones, falling into a pattern of movement that some part of my body—some part that was not born of the High Lords—remembered. Like waking up. That's what it felt like. I passed the well. Not a speck of dirt, not a stone out of place. A perfect, pretty trap, that mortal part of me warned. A trap designed from a time when humans were prey; now laid for a smarter, immortal sort of game. I was not prey any longer, I decided as I eased up to that door. And I was not a mouse. I was a wolf.

everywhere I go. You’re everything I see. Loving you is like being trapped in a house of mirrors, little mouse. And I’ve never felt so at home while being so lost inside you.

She felt that these clean-shaven men with bristling eyebrows were suavely concealing their doubts of her intelligence and her probity. Their jaws were like so many mouse-traps, baited with commonplaces.

What you’re seeing now is what I see every day. No matter how far I run, how hard I try to escape you—you’re everywhere I go. You’re everything I see. Loving you is like being trapped in a house of mirrors, little mouse.

ALAS,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up. Translated

At first, I felt everything while trapped in that house. And then, I felt nothing. And now, I’m left with a pile of broken pieces in my hands where my heart is supposed to be, and I don’t know how to mend it without cutting myself deeper.

dressed like a policeman!" BUT the nurse said: "I will set a mouse-trap!" SO that is the story of the two Bad Mice. But they were not so very, very naughty after all, because Tom Thumb paid for everything he broke. He found a crooked sixpence

Geoffrey Chaucer’s tender-hearted prioress, Madame Eglantyne, who was said to weep at the sight of a mouse caught in a trap, would nevertheless have had a gallows on her property, upon which, at the hands of her bailiff, she would have hanged thieves.

Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies ? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here : lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps : damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus!* And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.

So now I lye by Day and toss or rave by Night, since the ratling and perpetual Hum of the Town deny me rest: just as Madness and Phrensy are the vapours which rise from the lower Faculties, so the Chaos of the Streets reaches up even to the very Closet here and I am whirl'd about by cries of Knives to Grind and Here are your Mouse-Traps. I was last night about to enter the Shaddowe of Rest when a Watch-man, half-drunken, thumps at the Door with his Past Three-a-clock and his Rainy Wet Morning. And when at length I slipp'd into Sleep I had no sooner forgot my present Distemper than I was plunged into a worse: I dreamd my self to be lying in a small place under ground, like unto a Grave, and my Body was all broken while others sung. And there was a Face that did so terrifie me that I had like to have expired in my Dream. Well, I will say no more.

I thought of my favorite business analogy—the mouse who says let me out of the trap, I've decided I don't want the cheese.' There are a million business traps. You can get sloppy, you can get alcoholic, you can get megalomania, you can not understand your own limitations. There are a million ways to gum it up.

These men may be skilled in hunting, but what they don't know is that I've been hunted by a far scarier man. I was a mouse caught in a trap before, scared, and helpless as I was taken between the teeth of an apex predator. But I'm not their little mouse, and they are not Zade. And I will never succumb to them.

You want to know who killed your father, jackass? The very people you sold Addie off to. The Society killed him so you would betray me, and then target Addie. You fell right into their fucking trap and did all the dirty work for them.” He shakes his head. “How would they know about our deal and what you did to my father?

But this day he was lost in the story he made of their bodies. The men were in the midst of saving a six-inch Mickey Mouse trapped in a prison made of black VHS tapes. ...Before he could make out his mother's face, the backhand blasted the side of his head, followed by another, then more. A rain of it. A storm of mother. The boy's grandmother, hearing the screams, rushed in and, as if by instinct, knelt on all fours over the boy, make a small and feeble house with her frame. Inside it, the boy curled into his clothes and waited for his mother to calm. Through his grandmother's trembling arms, he noticed the videocassettes had toppled over. Mickey Mouse was free.

Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: '--that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness-- you know you say things are "much of a muchness"--did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?' 'Really, now you ask me,' said Alice, very much confused, 'I don't think--' 'Then you shouldn't talk,' said the Hatter. This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though

There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mouse-traps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

Ava was blessed with amazing beauty but was academically challenged. Angelina tried to give her a quick introduction to computers but was horrified at Ava’s lack of knowledge and complete failure to understand. Ava called the CD drawer the cup holder and honestly thought it was her holding her coffee or drink when typing. She thought the monitor was the telly and the mouse was the roller. She kept exiting programmes instead of closing documents and kept deleting items and forgetting to save things. Things happened Angelina’s computers that never happened before: programs failed to respond and the computer kept crashing. She typed e-mails and then printed them and put them in an envelope to post them, Angelina was speechless. She even killed a machine by constant abuse for the week. It just died the screen went blank and a message came up of fundamental hard drive failure, the monitor went black and the keyboard and mouse went dead and could not be restored. It went to the computer scrap yard, RIP. Angelina ran her out of the IT dept in their firm terrified she’d cause any more mayhem. She was the absolute blonde bombshell when it came to computers

You know, I still feel in my wrists certain echoes of the pram-pusher’s knack, such as, for example, the glib downward pressure one applied to the handle in order to have the carriage tip up and climb the curb. First came an elaborate mouse-gray vehicle of Belgian make, with fat autoid tires and luxurious springs, so large that it could not enter our puny elevator. It rolled on sidewalks in a slow stately mystery, with the trapped baby inside lying supine, well covered with down, silk and fur; only his eyes moved, warily, and sometimes they turned upward with one swift sweep of their showy lashes to follow the receding of branch-patterned blueness that flowed away from the edge of the half-cocked hood of the carriage, and presently he would dart a suspicious glance at my face to see if the teasing trees and sky did not belong, perhaps to the same order of things as did rattles and parental humor. There followed a lighter carriage, and in this, as he spun along, he would tend to rise, straining at his straps; clutching at the edges; standing there less like the groggy passenger of a pleasure boat than like an entranced scientist in a spaceship; surveying the speckled skeins of a live, warm world; eyeing with philosophic interest the pillow he had managed to throw overboard; falling out himself when a strap burst one day. Still later he rode in one of those small contraptions called strollers; from initial springy and secure heights the child came lower and lower, until, when he was about one and a half, he touched ground in front of the moving stroller by slipping forward out of his seat and beating the sidewalk with his heels in anticipation of being set loose in some public garden. A new wave of evolution started to swell, gradually lifting him again from the ground, when, for his second birthday, he received a four-foot-long, silver-painted Mercedes racing car operated by inside pedals, like an organ, and in this he used to drive with a pumping, clanking noise up and down the sidewalk of the Kurfurstendamm while from open windows came the multiplied roar of a dictator still pounding his chest in the Neander valley we had left far behind.

Trapping my bloody lip between my teeth, I trail the petals alongside the ridge of his cock, delighting in the way his stomach clenches. Veins protrude from his length, and I follow them up to the tip with the flower, coating him in my wetness. “Addie,” he warns when I slide it down to his balls, causing him to tense. My lips curl mischievously as I lean forward and place a soft kiss on his cock, staring up at him beneath my lashes with a sultry look.

Sometimes in those moments, he’ll place soft kisses along my jaw, never pushing it too far, but familiarizing me with the feel of his affection. More and more, I crave it and seek it out. And lately, I’ve begun to feel like it’s not enough. Like I need more. Sensing my growing arousal, he turns his head and places a soft kiss on my knee, peeking up at me through thick, black lashes. My teeth trap my bottom lip between them, and his eyes blaze in return.

you, I did once, years ago, do a little picture of Margaret Thatcher – bless her – a tiny little miniature. Then I pasted it onto a matchbox.” Domenica looked puzzled. “Oh?” Angus smiled. “Yes. Then I stood the matchbox outside a mouse hole. The mouse had been bothering me – he had gnawed away at some canvas I had. So I used it as a mouse-scarer. It was more humane than a mouse-trap, you see. The mouse came out and saw this picture of Margaret Thatcher staring at him and he ran straight back into the hole. It was very effective.

Why’d you run, Mouse?” “I have horses to ride tomorrow ... today and—” “Stop biting the inside of your cheeks and tell me the truth. Why’d you run?” Fuck. I so wasn’t ready for this conversation. He didn’t deserve to know that his voice lit me up like a firecracker, that staring up at him on stage undid me, and I couldn’t control the want inside me. Then Logan did something I hadn’t been prepared for. He snagged my hand, jerked me up against him, and caressed my hair. “I like the bed look. And the pink boxers ...” He trapped my hand behind my back. “Liking those too.

I breathe out a sigh of relief, a small weight lifting off my shoulders with the confirmation that they didn’t get the chance to trap Addie. Until I hear the words that come out of their fucking mouths. “Where did she go?” Brad asks, staring at Mark. “The van is already set to go. They just need to know their location.” I snap straight, and my body stiffens like cement being injected into my spinal cord. “We’ll find them,” Mark placates. “Zack wasn’t with them, so he must’ve lost them in the chaos. It’s the perfect time.” “You do realize you’re going to have to handle him, right? When he finds out Addie is gone?” Robert cuts in. “With those nasty scars on his face, I have a feeling you’re underestimating him.

Daya is tied to a chair, tipped over on the side, with her arms trapped uncomfortably beneath her weight. She’s screaming through the tape stuck to her mouth, death radiating in her glare. When she spots me, her eyes widen, and then she starts wriggling fiercely as if she’s trying to make her presence known. Can’t really see her any clearer when she’s right in my face. Noticing Daya’s reaction, Luke turns his head, and his own eyes pop open before he scrambles for his gun. I shoot the back of his knee before he makes it a step, feeling nothing even as he falls to the ground with an agonized shout. “Simmer down, Daya,” I say, walking over to her. “I can see you. Wiggling like a worm on a hook is only going to rub your skin even rawer.

Broadway lit up just as crazy as ever, and the crowd thick as molasses. Just fling yourself into it like an ant and let yourself get pushed along. Everybody doing it, some for a good reason, and some for no reason at all. All this push and movement representing action, success, get ahead. Stop and look at shoes, or fancy shirts. The new fall overcoat, wedding rings at 98 cents a piece. Every other joint a food emporium. Everytime I hit that runway toward dinner hour, a fever of expectancy seized me. It's only a stretch of a few blocks from Time Square to 50th street, and when one says 'Broadway', that's all that's really meant. And it's really nothing, just a chicken run, and a lousy one at that. But at 7 in the evening, when everybody's rushing for a table, there is a sort of electrical crackle in the air. And your hair stands on end like antennae, and if you're receptive, you not only get every flash and flicker, but you get the statistical itch. The quid pro quo of the interactive, interstitial, ectoplasmatic quantum of bodies jostling in space like the stars which compose the Milky Way. Only, this is the gay white way. The top of the world with no roof above and not even a crack or a hole under your feet to fall through and say it's a lie. The absolute impersonality of it brings you to a pitch of warm human delirium, which makes you run forward like a blind nag, and wag your delirious ears. Everyone is so utterly, confoundedly not himself, that you become automatically the personification of the whole human race. Shaking hands with a thousand human hands, cackling with a thousand different human tongues, cursing, applauding, whistling, crooning, soliloquizing, orating, gesticulating, urinating, fecundating, wheedling, cajoling, whimpering, bartering, pimping, caterwauling, and so on and so forth. You are all the men who ever lived up until Moses, and beyond that, you are a woman buying a bird cage, or just a mouse trap.

This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse go on for some time without interrupting it. “They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; “and they drew all manner of things—everything that begins with an M—” “Why with an M?” said Alice. “Why not?” said the March Hare. Alice was silent. The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: “—that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness—you know you say things are ‘much of a muchness’—did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness!” “Really, now you ask me,” said Alice, very much confused, “I don’t think—” “Then you shouldn’t talk,” said the Hatter. This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great disgust, and walked off: the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot.

All the best stories end with a clinch.

Common politeness required that I find out; so did extreme nosiness.

His speech was invariably limited to the smallest possible quantity of words, released grudgingly from his mouth as though each one was a very small mouse escaping from a capacious trap.

To those who are not, like Wordsworth's primrose, "dwellers on the river's brim," it may be necessary to explain that an outrigger is an apology for a boat, and, apparently, a feeble imitation of a plank–that the individual who hazards his own life in it is happily prevented, by its absurd form, from making any other person a sharer in his danger–that he is liable to be overset by any passing steamer, or by the slightest change of his own posture–that it is difficult to conceive how he ever got into such a thing, or how he is ever to get out of it again, and that the effect he produces on an unprejudiced spectator is that of an aquatic mouse caught in a boat-trap, from which he will never emerge alive, notwithstanding the continual struggle he appears to keep up.

It’d probably be more comfortable to kiss a mouse trap—which, yes, I’ve done on a dare. Would not recommend

He's just a whiny bitch trapped in a man’s body.

You’re everything I see. Loving you is like being trapped in a house of mirrors, little mouse. And I’ve never felt so at home while being so lost inside you.

Like the first breath of air after being trapped underwater. It's a sound of both pain and relief. Of desperation and desire. When you’ve gone so long without oxygen, that first breath is the only thing that makes sense, and your body takes it in without permission.

15 REASONS TO YELL Because you haven’t let out a yell in ages. To make sure all your vowels are still in their proper places. Because you’re alone and in desperate need of an echo. To measure the height of a Gothic cathedral. To cheer on an Italian cyclist. To shoo off a grouchy mouse. So they hear you from the last row of the theatre. So they hear you from the other side of the creek. So the fishes caught in the fish trap hear you. When you’re in water up to your neck, to call for a ring buoy. To measure the depth of a bottomless well. To invite the wolves to your birthday party. So everyone knows that yelling is not so easy. Because some others are unable to yell. So that the woods will learn your name. (Translated, from the Basque, by Elizabeth Macklin.)

Look around you,” he commands softly. Hesitantly, I pull my eyes away from his, dragging my gaze across the dozens of mirrors. “What you’re seeing now is what I see every day. No matter how far I run, how hard I try to escape you—you’re everywhere I go. You’re everything I see. Loving you is like being trapped in a house of mirrors, little mouse. And I’ve never felt so at home while being so lost inside you.

One day, you will realize that you are not trapped in a prison,” he murmurs roughly. “You are in my church where I am your God, and you are my equal. I’m not a jail, little mouse, I am your sanctuary.

The free cheese in a mousetrap is only for the mouse.

The mechanism of the clock was enclosed in a box resembling a large cupboard, but I was disappointed with the workings. They were much smaller than I had anticipated. The clock was worked by heavy weights suspended on long cables. My father picked up a handle like the crank handle of a car and wound them up. There were two of them. One to work the hands, the other controlling the hammer which struck out the hours on a large bell. Then the mousetraps were set, Not to catch mice, but to control the lighting. Previously my father had to make a special trip each evening to switch on the lights of the clock, returning near midnight to switch them off. To obviate this he invented a method of light control which may have been unique. Two switches, one for switching on and the other for switching off were used. They were fixed on the inside wall of the tower. A mousetrap mounted near each switch was so arranged that when the trap sprung, the arc traversed by the closing trap enabled the switch to be flicked on or off as required. Adjustable sleeves were set along the the cables for required times. The sleeves on the descending cables tripped the mouse traps which actuated the switches.

That’s what he is—a snake, a dangerous predator—and here I am, a mouse…waiting to be devoured. Luna Ketz, Rise Above Twilight

Whose mouse are you?" Nobody's mouse. "Where is your mother?" Inside a cat. "Where is your father?" Caught in a trap.

tall buildings and clustered streets of the city had her trapped like a mouse in a maze, without even the possible reward of cheese.

Benita set the letter down. Connie - her dear Connie, whom she had never even said good-bye to. Whom she had hated - really hated- for so long. But he had always been strong. He had lived his life on a plane of grand ideals and all-encompassing rights and wrongs. His view had been much longer than the trappings of his own life. And she had been the little mouse who could see no farther than her own nose, stumbling over roots and stones, oblivious to the oncoming storm.

Hesitantly, I pull my eyes away from his, dragging my gaze across the dozens of mirrors. “What you’re seeing now is what I see every day. No matter how far I run, how hard I try to escape you—you’re everywhere I go. You’re everything I see. Loving you is like being trapped in a house of mirrors, little mouse. And I’ve never felt so at home while being so lost inside you.

I found my truck where I had left it, parked with the rear against a juniper. Water in the jugs had frozen. A mouse trap in the back still hadn’t caught the mouse who was living in my wool socks and eating holes in my plastic bags. I drove north. By the time the Milky Way was out I had reached the foot of the Book Cliffs and the remains of Thompson, Utah. The train comes through the town and was heading out for Christmas. I was an hour late. The train is customarily two hours late. I still had time to set pennies on the tracks. This was the only time I had seen another customer in the Silver Grill Cafe. Through the window he sat at one end of the counter gesturing toward the gray-haired woman who runs the place, sitting at the other end. I once ordered a cinnamon roll in there, and she peeled open a box she had gone all the way to Moab City Market a couple days earlier to purchase. By telling me this, she was emphasizing the fact that the cinnamon rolls were fresh. She put it in the microwave for me. Gave me an extra pat of butter, the kind with foil around it. I spent an hour once just up the street talking to the post mistress and her cat. I checked the WANTED bulletins, then ran when the train came through. If you are not standing at the tracks in Thompson, the Amtrak will not stop. They call it a whistle stop. One of the few left in the country. The gray-haired woman shut down the cafe, clicked off the front lights. Electricity was buzzing out of the single street light, so I opened the truck door and turned on the tape deck. After a while I shut it off because my battery has never proved itself to be resilient. A couple of freight trains tore through with the impact of sudden cataclysm, flattening my pennies. Then the buzzing of the street light. Then the coyotes. They were yelping and howling up Sego Canyon, where there are pre-Anasazi paintings on the walls—big, round eyes, huge and red, looking over the canyon. The train was three hours late. I stood nearly on the tracks so they couldn’t miss me with that blinding, drunken light. The conductor threw open the steel door. “Shoot,” he yelled. “It’s dark out here!” I dove through and tackled him with my backpacks, flashing a ticket in his face. He quickly announced that I had too many pieces, but the train was already moving. I looked back out. Utah was black. He pulled the door closed and the train began to rock along the tracks. When I came down the aisle I saw a few passengers who were still awake, on their way to San Francisco or Las Vegas. Overhead lights were trained on paperbacks in their laps. They were staring out their windows into absolute darkness. I knew what they were thinking; there is nothing out there.

Loving you is like being trapped in a house of mirrors, little mouse.

One day, you will realize that you are not trapped in a prison,” he murmurs roughly. “You are in my church where I am your God, and you are my equal. I’m not a jail, little mouse, I am your sanctuary

Loving you is like being trapped in a house of mirrors,

Something very close to a groan went up from the various members of the Cabinet. They felt themselves trapped. They were getting into an area which some felt was very close to magic and they felt incompetent to deal with the intangibles with which they were surrounded.

Fear is something akin to catching a mouse in a bear trap. We mistakenly thought that the thing that we were trying to kill was a whole lot bigger than it actually was.

That’s like making the mouse pay for the cheese you put in his trap.

Because im obsessed, I'm addicted. And I will gradly cross every single line if it means making this girl mine. If it means forcing her to be mine. No matter. She won't be able to escape me no. I've just found myself a little mouse, and I won't stop until I've trapped her.

I was a mouse caught in a trap before, scared, and helpless as I was taken between the teeth of an apex predator. But I'm not their little mouse, and they are not Zade. And I will never succumb to them.

Bad Trash ( I Don't Like the Sound of That) Runs in the family R u n s in the f a m i l y- No, that's an atrocity you won't hear from me I don't like the sound of that Not lyin' in a mouse trap- I'm a mofo' sassy cat I don't clean no d i r t y rat No, not my reality Said not M Y reality- Don't shine shit in front of me and call it my reality! I don't like the sound of that Cruel intentions get tires flat I say what will shine for me I say what will bleed for me I call out the trash to me Bad trash always dies for me Clawed out my own reality The top from the back alley I don't run in the family I run far from the alley Calling all my sour soulmates- Recovering a l l e y c a ts You all clean up so good now No bad, bad trash, just LoVe pats! No bad trash, just LoVe pats

One day, you will realize that you are not trapped in a prison,” he murmurs roughly. “You are in my church where I am your God, and you are my equal. I’m not a jail, little mouse, I am your sanctuary.” My mouth dries. The tip of my tongue darts out, wetting my bottom lip and swiping across his lips. Just a brush, but enough to light a spark. An answering growl arises as I ask, “Does that make me a goddess?” He pulls me impossibly closer, his lips now pressed against mine lightly. “Baby, you rule the fucking kingdom, and I will gladly bow to you.

You want to know why I love the house of mirrors?" he murmurs in my ear, eliciting sparks throughout my nerve endings. His voice is full of dark promises and dangerous beginnings. I swallow thickly. "Why?" I whisper. "Look around you," he commands softly. Hesitantly, I pull my eyes away from his, dragging my gaze across the dozens of mirrors. "What you're seeing now is what I see every day. No matter how far I run, how hard I try to escape you-you're everywhere I go. You're everything I see. Loving you is like being trapped in a house of mirrors, little mouse. And l've never felt so at home while being so lost inside you.

No matter. She won’t be able to escape me now. I’ve just found myself a little mouse, and I won’t stop until I’ve trapped her.

I was not prey any longer, I decided as I eased up to that door. And I was not a mouse. I was a wolf.

... no trap can be successful without uncounsciously cooperation from a victim. No one forces the mouse to seek cheese in a mousetrap.

Now let’s be going before Susina finishes biting the cash, and comes to ravish you.” “You paid her. I’m in your debt-“ “Yes, yes, and the sun is a vast light, and the world has four corners, and we are all in Lucifer’s net. Out of the trap, mouse. The cheese is eaten.

...Remember, the second mouse to the trap is the one who always gets the cheese.

The world was never so resplendent with opportunity as it is today. On every hand there is an ever-increasing demand for the services of the man or the woman who makes a better mouse-trap or performs better stenographic service or preaches a better sermon or digs a better ditch or runs a more accommodating bank.

the tall buildings and clustered streets of the city had her trapped like a mouse in a maze, without even the possible reward of cheese.

Together we watched the little bird climb up and down the ramp, and even saw it eat a dead mouse. That was a first, even for me. It held the critter with its feet and tore off the poor thing’s head. Then after bolting the head down, it picked at the body until there was nothing left of it. All this seemed shocking, especially to Greta, because she hadn’t been through the process of reading books, setting traps, and becoming hardened to what it takes to keep an owl alive, as I had. But I found it hard to watch too. “Well, we eat meat,” Greta finally said. “Only, first, somebody else--the butcher, I guess--has to cut off the head of the chicken or the cow so that we don’t have to see it looking at us.” Greta had a way of putting things.

Janner looked at the others. He had done his best to apologize and had even gone one step further with a compliment. “What was that all about?” he asked under his breath. “Just let him be,” Nia said. “He’ll be fine.” The tent was rolled and tied to Podo’s pack, and in minutes the company was ready to go. After all that had happened the day before, Janner felt ready for anything. His pack had lost its stiffness and hung from his shoulders in a way that fit him. He had wielded his sword in battle, and its weight no longer burdened him but gave him courage. He recalled the heft of the bow in his hand, the tension and release when he drew it and loosed the arrows. The calluses on his palms felt good, and he imagined his hands one day being as tough and capable as Podo’s. “Say the word, King Kalmar,” Podo said with a slight bow of his head. Tink looked like a mouse in a trap. Then he loosed a belch that rivaled one of Podo’s, and in a fit of laughter, the company set off into the forest.

Oh dear," said the mouse, "the world shrinks with every passing day. At first it was so vast I was afraid; I ran on further and was cheered when at last, in the distance, to the right and to the left, I saw walls; but these long walls converge on one another so quickly that I'm already in the final room, and there, in the corner, lies the trap into which I'm running." "You just have to change direction," said the cat, and ate him.

For a moment I imagined myself to be that mouse, not a guard at all but just another convicted criminal there on the Green Mile, convicted and condemned but still managing to look bravely up at a desk that must have seemed miles high to it (as the judgment seat of God will no doubt someday seem to us), and at the heavy-voiced, blue-coated giants who sat behind it. Giants that shot its kind with BB guns, or swatted them with brooms, or set traps on them, traps that broke their backs while they crept cautiously over the word VICTOR to nibble at the cheese on the little copper plate.

If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about. The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said “New York” each meant merely “The town I am imagining in my own head,” how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all. In the same way, if the Rule of Decent Behaviour meant simply “whatever each nation happens to approve,” there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other; no sense in saying that the world could ever grow morally better or morally worse. I conclude then, that though the differences between people’s ideas of Decent Behaviour often make you suspect that there is no real natural Law of Behaviour at all, yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the opposite. But one word before I end. I have met people who exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, “Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?” But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mouse-traps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house. Chapter

...you have a deep confidence, a sexual prowess, a bullheaded pride in the soft, hugry magnet that heaves between your legs. You know it. No man can ever be a mouse in your house because you'll always have someone - a hot clerk in a bookstore, a horny shrink, a closeted rich girl. Someone will always watch over you and you beliebeve that you are special. In the cage, you feel loved, not trapped.

...you have a deep confidence, a sexual prowess, a bullheaded pride in the soft, hugry magnet that heaves between your legs. You know it. No man can ever be a mouse in your house because you'll always have someone - a hot clerk in a bookstore, a horny shrink, a closeted rich girl. Someone will always watch over you and you believe that you are special. In the cage, you feel loved, not trapped.

The only free cheese is in the mouse trap

One day, you will realize that you are not trapped in a prison, you are my chuck where I am your God, and you are my equal. I'm not a jail, little mouse, I am your sanctuary.