Rat King Quotes

A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.

Motherf**ker. Bastard ass motherf**ker. C**ks**king rat-bitch bastard motherf**ker!” – Blay

The scarcity of years does not necessitate lack of wisdom.

Rafael, the Rat King, stared at the carnage with black-button eyes. "She is dead." "Ding dong, the witch is dead,

Who are you when no one picks you up to hold you?" asked the Rat King. "When no one is looking at you, or whispering to you, who are you then?

Guard yourself and your conscience no one else will and know that a bad decision at the right time can destroy you far more surely than any bullet!

And Adam ruled, for he was the King. Until the day his will to be King deserted him. Then he died, food for a stronger. And the strongest was always the King, not by strength alone, but King by cunning and luck and strength together. Among the rats.

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

Because men are killing the forests the fairy tales are running away. The spindle doesn't know whom to prick, the little girl's hands that her father has chopped off, haven't a single tree to catch hold of, the third wish remains unspoken. King Thrushbeard no longer owns one thing. Children can no longer get lost. The number seven means no more than exactly seven. Because men have killed the forests, the fairy tales are trotting off to the cities and end badly.

Очите им се срещнаха и едно обещание бе дадено, прието и върнато.

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou no breath at all?

And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life And thou no breath at all? O thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never.

There are no buts, my son. True there are degrees of honor — but one man can have only one code. Do what you like. It's your choice. Some things a man must decide for himself. Sometimes you have to adapt to circumstances. But for the love of God guard yourself and your conscience — no one else will — and know that a bad decision at the right time can destroy you far more surely than any bullet!

...and that bastard Breckinridge Scott, yes, the Phalanx king, still hiding like a rat in his Antarctic Fortress of Scumditude. --Arthur Sinclair

He was twisted as a pretzel, he was a tinfoil-halo shitnosed frogstomping king rat asshole, but he wasn't stupid.

...щом се доверяваш на някого и го наемаш заради ума му, дай му възможност да действа. Иначе защо са ти хора, дето само изпълняват заповеди и си налягат парцалите.

Drunks they may be, but a drunken man knows not fear. Fools, aye, but a fool can kill a king. Rats, that too, but a thousand rats can bring down a bear.

Kill, torture, burn! Just so long as it’s in the name of God, you’re all right. What a lot of hypocrisy! Don’t give me faith! It’s nothing!

It is difficult for the ordinary voter to come to grips with the notion that a truly evil man, a truthless monster with the brains of a king rat and the soul of a cockroach, is about to be sworn in as the president of the United States for the next four years. . . . And he will bring his gang in with him, a mean network of lawyers and salesmen and pimps who will loot the national treasury, warp the laws, mock the rules and stay awake 22 hours a day looking for at least one reason to declare war, officially, on some hapless tribe in the Sahara or heathen fanatic like the Ayatollah Khomeini.

And yet you have faith in the King,” Father Donovan said quietly.

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

So you’re not on the Rat King’s side then?” “Fuck no. He has no sense of style, for one thing. And for another… No, that’s it. That’s my only reason.

She wore red lipstick the next time that I saw her, though her hair was more voluminous with dirt than before. Owing, like everything else about these girls, to the fertility of rats.

Temple of the Rat King. Ark of the Soot God. Sphincter of Hades. Yes, King's Cross Station, where, according to Knuckle Sandwich, a blow job costs only five quid - any of the furthest-left three cubicles in the men's lavvy downstairs, twenty-four hours a day.

Royce cast a harsh and anxious look at the prince. “What?” Alric asked. “I thought we discussed the importance of keeping a low profile.” “Oh, please.” The prince waved a hand at the thief. “I don’t think it will get me killed if this monk knows I’m the king. Look at him. I’ve seen drowned rats more formidable.

Без жената мъжът е просто една нелепа шега.

At last, Sturmhond straightened the lapels of his teal frock coat and said, “Well, Brekker, it’s obvious you only deal in half-truths and outright lies, so you’re clearly the man for the job.” “There’s just one thing,” said Kaz, studying the privateer’s broken nose and ruddy hair. “Before we join hands and jump off a cliff together, I want to know exactly who I’m running with.” Sturmhond lifted a brow. “We haven’t been on a road trip or exchanged clothes, but I think our introductions were civilized enough.” “Who are you really, privateer?” “Is this an existential question?” “No proper thief talks the way you do.” “How narrow-minded of you.” “I know the look of a rich man’s son, and I don’t believe a king would send an ordinary privateer to handle business this sensitive.” “Ordinary,” scoffed Sturmhond. “Are you so schooled in politics?” “I know my way around a deal. Who are you? We get the truth or my crew walks.” “Are you so sure that would be possible, Brekker? I know your plans now. I’m accompanied by two of the world’s most legendary Grisha, and I’m not too bad in a fight either.” “And I’m the canal rat who brought Kuwei Yul-Bo out of the Ice Court alive. Let me know how you like your chances.” His crew didn’t have clothes or titles to rival the Ravkans, but Kaz knew where he’d put his money if he had any left. Sturmhond clasped his hands behind his back, and Kaz saw the barest shift in his demeanor. His eyes lost their bemused gleam and took on a surprising weight. No ordinary privateer at all. “Let us say,” said Sturmhond, gaze trained on the Ketterdam street below, “hypothetically, of course, that the Ravkan king has intelligence networks that reach deep within Kerch, Fjerda, and the Shu Han, and that he knows exactly how important Kuwei Yul-Bo could be to the future of his country. Let us say that king would trust no one to negotiate such matters but himself, but that he also knows just how dangerous it is to travel under his own name when his country is in turmoil, when he has no heir and the Lantsov succession is in no way secured.” “So hypothetically,” Kaz said, “you might be addressed as Your Highness.

...докато накрая и те започваха да се заричат: "От утре тръгвам редовно. От утре започвам да се подготвям за онова, което искам да бъда след войната. Няма време за губене. От утре вече тръгвам". Но в Чанги, както навсякъде, съществуваше само днес.

How its heart beats! How it struggles to get away! As we do, Paul. As we do. We think we know so much, but we really don’t know any more than a rat in a trap—a rat with a broken back that thinks it still wants to live.

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces.The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter

Ако си лишен от опита на годините, това не означава, че си лишен от разум.

It’s amputate or die. Simple. And when it comes down to it, you can’t die. Not yet. Once you’re born, you are obligated to survive. At all costs.

those who are young will take risks which even the devil would pass by.

Ce minunat, ce minunat de simplu e să poți spune că dragostea te aduce aproape de Dumnezeu.

It's easy for men to be friends as close as brothers when they're poor and struggling, but much harder when things are going well. Friends are never as close as blood. Remember that, Rat.

The terror ran endlessly on in his mind, making him feel like a rat trapped on an exercise wheel. And when he tried to look ahead to some better, brighter time, he could see only darkness.

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.

Жената е създадена да изкушава. Тя живее с насладата да бъде желана.

How its heart beats! How it struggles to get away! As we do, Paul. As we do. We think we know so much, but we really don’t know any more than a rat in a trap—a

but to a dog, the stench of a decaying rat probably smells like Chanel No. 5.

You are a king.” “Not while I wear this coat.” “Even with a pelican on your head, you’d still be the king of Ravka, and it wouldn’t kill that Barrel rat to show a bit of respect.

I arrived here a King’s Hand, riding through the gates at the head of my own sworn men, Tyrion reflected, and I leave like a rat scuttling through the dark, holding hands with a spider.

Now it’s at peace.” She shrugged, then laughed. “I’ll get my gun, Paul, shall I? Maybe the next world is better. For rats and people both—not that there’s much difference between the two.

A nice street, Fred. A nice neighborhood. Oh, I know how the intellectuals sneer at suburbia - it's not as romantic as the rat-infested tenements or the hale-and-hearty back-to-the-land stuff. There are no great museums in suburbia, no great forests, no great challenges.

We may be rats in a maze as far as the Obama administration is concerned, but in Texas, we are rats with a firm knowledge of just where the button is and how to push it. It helps us put up with all the nonsense and it would do the folks in Washington well to remember that. - Tom King ("Why the Secession Talk in Texas")

The only direction not represented in their construction was vertical.

The novels of James Clavell’s world-famous Asian Saga (Shōgun, Tai-Pan, Gai-Jin, King Rat, Noble House, and Whirlwind) were each critically acclaimed major

He ended the world because it was not to his liking and here I am challenging the same monster for a fifteen-year-old rat from the slums

The rats are probably back already, a voice deep in my mind whispered. Eating her. They’ll finish the good parts, the tasty parts, the delicacies, and then

Hank Peters woke up in the early hours of the next morning from a dream of huge rats crawling out of an open grave, a grave which held the green and rotting body of Hubie Marsten, with a frayed length of manila hemp around his neck. Peters lay propped on his elbows, breathing heavily, naked torso slicked with sweat, and when his wife touched his arm he screamed aloud. EIGHT

Generally, after three dates one of three things took place: 1) he’d express his lack of interest with a silent fade-out that made me go insane with anxiety; 2) I’d express my lack of interest with an overlong and tortured “it’s not you, it’s me” e-mail; 3) we’d devolve into a sexual entanglement that either was or wasn’t physically satisfying but invariably thrived on noncommunication. After a while it seemed that everyone I knew was tangled in several entanglements at a time, as if we were all becoming intertwined, like a giant rat king, our tails a knotted mass, our mouths gasping for air.

With no small amount of swagger, Gavin Greyling said, "I remember Gavin fucking Guile, who won the False Prism's War, who outwitted the Thorn Conspirators and ended the Red Cliff Uprising. Gavin Guile, who brought low pirate kings and bandit lords, who ended the Blood Wars with wits and one deadly wave of his hand, who brought justice to the Seven Satrapies. Gavin Guile, who hunted wights and criminals, who built Brightwater Wall in less than a week, who aborted the birth of gods, destroyed at least two bane, and killed a god full fledged at Ruic Head. Gavin Guile, who faced a sea demon and lived, saving all the people of Garriston and the Blackguard, too. Gavin Guile, who sank Pash vecchio's great ship Gargantua with a rat. Gavin Guile, who armed us for war and gave the Blackguard the seas entire with ou sea chariots and hull wreckers. Gavin Guile, heart of our heart, our Promachos, the one who goes before us in war, who came and conquered and will come again.

It is an age lurching along the lip of a dark precipice, peeking fearfully into chaos's empty eyes, enrapt, like a giddy rat trying to stare down a hungry cobra. The gods are restless, tossing and turning and wakening in snippets to conspire at mischief. Their bastard offspring, the hundred million spirits of rock and brook and tree, of place and time and emotion, find old constraints are rotting. The Postern of Fate stands ajar. The world faces an age of fear, of conflict, of grand sorcery, of great change, and of greater despair amongst mortal men. And the cliffs of ice creep forward. Great kings walk the earth. They cannot help but collide. Great ideas sweep back and forth aross the face of a habitable world that is shrinking. Those cannot help but fire hatred and fear amongst adherents of dogmas and doctrines under increasing pressure. As always, those who do the world's work most dearly pay the price of the world's pain.

You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems

Well, cats live as long as dogs,” he said, “mostly, anyway.” This was a lie, and he knew it. Cats lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths, always just below the usual range of human sight. Here was Church, dozing in the sun (or appearing to), Church who slept peacefully on his daughter’s bed every night, Church who had been so cute as a kitten, all tangled up in a ball of string. And yet Louis had seen him stalk a bird with a broken wing, his green eyes sparkling with curiosity and—yes, Louis would have sworn it—cold delight. He rarely killed what he stalked, but there had been one notable exception—a large rat, probably caught in the alley between their apartment house and the next. Church had really put the blocks to that baby. It had been so bloody and gore-flecked that Rachel, then in her sixth month with Gage, had had to run into the bathroom and vomit. Violent lives, violent deaths. A dog got them and ripped them open instead of just chasing them like the bumbling, easily fooled dogs in the TV cartoons, or another tom got them, or a poisoned bait, or a passing car. Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.

It is said that the dead are infinitely patient, although it is usually said by the living, and how would they know?

Я больше, чем сумма моих составляющих.

Yields?” Lord Rowan laughed. “When Mace Tyrell laid siege to Storm’s End, Stannis ate rats rather than open his gates.

She spoke with rats and spiders, it was said, and all the vermin of King’s Landing came to her by night to tell tales of any fool rash enough to speak against the king.

... because I happen to think - this is just my personal opinion - that the only lower form of life than a man who would beat up a woman is a rat with syphilis.

But she wasn’t a virgin and that hurt Grey, for she had implied it many times. But he pretended that he didn’t know she had cheated him.

Almost everything, in fact, except a dead rat and a string to swing it on.

That book was The Call of Cthulhu, and the stories in it scared me plenty, especially one called “The Rats in the Walls.

Without women, Peter Marlowe thought helplessly, men are only a cruel joke.

Well, God hates a coward,

Doesn’t prove she’s dumped you for a gym rat with the face of Keanu Reeves, the anatomy of King Dong, and the charisma of moi

Welcome,” Bell said, not rising from a large wooden chair that had been placed in the center of the room like it was a throne. Would that make him the king of sewer rats?

The King of Rats, that is. His Majesty of the fabled Rats’ Castle, lord of the fey underworld, duke of the downtrodden, prince of the perennially pissed-on.

I think because I just hated that little fuck so much. That barking rat. That fur-covered shit machine.

When you're wrting, the book is the boss. (...) And if you slowed down the story began to fade, as dreams did on waking" Rat

It is acceptable,” said the mother rat. “Fear is death.

You had to give the guy some credit. He was twisted as a pretzel, he was a tinfoil-halo shit-nosed frogstomping king rat asshole, but he wasn’t stupid.

Already she felt like a fugitive, and a terrible thought had begun to gnaw at her mind like a rat gnawing cheese:

They were in a gloomy netherworld, scurrying like rats through a gigantic trash-midden.

A man’s life is always at a crossroads. And not his life alone, not if he’s a man. Always others in the balance.

arrived here a King’s Hand, riding through the gates at the head of my own sworn men, Tyrion reflected, and I leave like a rat scuttling through the dark, holding hands with a spider.

„Er hatte für jeden Anlass ein Bibelzitat, dieser Norton, und wann immer man einen solchen Mann trifft, sollte man, das ist mein Rat, nur grinsen und sich beide Hände vor die Eier halten.

Writers have different habits, different ways of getting in the groove, and they work at different speeds, but to produce a long work, there must always come extended periods of focused narration." Rat

Karsa shrugged. ‘The Malazan soldiers in Genabaris said the Seven Cities was going to rebel against their occupiers. This is why the Teblor do not make conquests. Better that the enemy keeps its land, so that we may raid again and again.’ ‘Not the imperial way,’ the Daru responded, shaking his head. ‘Possession and control, the two are like insatiable hungers for some people. Oh, no doubt the Malazans have thought up countless justifications for their wars of expansion. It’s well known that Seven Cities was a rat’s warren of feuds and civil wars, leaving most of the population suffering and miserable and starving under the heels of fat warlords and corrupt priest-kings. And that, with the Malazan conquest, the thugs ended up spiked to the city walls or on the run. And the wilder tribes no longer sweep down out of the hills to deliver mayhem on their more civilized kin. And the tyranny of the priesthoods was shattered, putting an end to human sacrifice and extortion. And of course the merchants have never been richer, or safer on these roads. So, all in all, this land is rife for rebellion.

Adam ruled over všemi.Byl Král.Až the day he will be king opustila.Pak came forth and became food for the silnější.A strongest was always king , not only due to its strength, but thanks to his smarts , luck and strength together. among rats.

Boy, you sound as crazy as a rat in a shithouse. That’s okay. I like crazy people. I’m crazy myself. Tripped right outta my fuckin gourd. Trashcan Man, huh? I like that. We make a pair. The fucking Kid and the fucking Trashcan Man. Shake, Trash.

He felt his fear twisting and turning inside him beneath his poker face. Sometimes it was a big and panicky elephant, trampling everything: the elephant. Sometimes it was small and gnawing, ripping with sharp teeth: the rat. It was always with with.

God, O God, where art thou? Thou art as distant to me as the lady combing rice in the Yunnan Province of China or a piece of floating space debris circling Pegasi. In this feeling-dead world of post traumatic stress, skepticism is king, queen, and court jester.

– Один плюс один равняется одному, твою мать, – сказал он и тяжело обрушил флейту на челюсть Дудочника. Тот отшатнулся, но не упал. – Я не крыса плюс человек, усек? Я больше, чем один из двух, и я больше, чем оба. Я новое существо. Ты не заставишь меня танцевать.

You speak of Armageddon,” Callahan said in a low, troubled voice. Roland shook his head, but not in disagreement. “I don’t know that word, Pere, but I’m speaking of great death and great destruction, sure. And somewhere—along the Beam connecting Fish to Rat, perhaps—that has now happened.

Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems. And who can you blame? You were the one who chose to live here, in this hard town with its hard people, the financial capital of the world, land of opportunity for the white man and a tundra of spent dreams and empty promises for anyone else stupid enough to believe the hype. Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder. She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die.

Er lachte wieder sein zynisches, verletztes Lachen – und dieses Lachen besagte: Rat mal, was ich herausgefunden habe, als ich acht wurde oder so? Ich habe herausgefunden, dass das ganze Leben eine verdammte Scheiße ist und dass sich daran so bald nichts ändern wird. Vielleicht wird sich auch nie etwas daran ändern. Und das kotzt mich an, aber es hat auch seine komischen Seiten. Verstehst du, was ich meine?

It was the egg,” Slade snapped, “because the mutation began with the misreplication of DNA during fertilization of the embryo and its development.  It wasn’t like an adult bird just magically became a mutant chicken that started popping out more chickens.  I have always thought it was an incredibly stupid question, and whoever came up with it obviously had no background in or understanding of science.” “Personally,

I can see him now, the victim of labyrinthine machinations that carved away his ears and tongue: a mute prince tossed into a slaver's galley and lost at sea, and at sea until the pink weed filled his head with death, and he fell in step behind the dealer that fed a habit in exchange for cheap muscle. And now, the lost king slept mute among beggar boys and rats spreading crowns in a knighthood of orphans and drugs. Who knows his true history? All we know is his fate among the smoke.

It seems that the white church is not God’s redemptive agent,” he wrote, “but, rather, an agent of the old society. Most church fellowships are more concerned about drinking or new buildings or Sunday closing than about children who die of rat bites or men who are killed because they want to be treated like men.”46 It was a scathing indictment of white racism, and it brought together the call for justice that King and others in the civil rights movement had made with Black Power’s call for Black agency and self-determination

Before you were born, the year ninety-two, lost what was precious, and that what was new. The blink of an eye, the beat of a heart, Out went the candle, and guilt was my part. A king and his knight went hunting a boar, A rat and his friends were hunting for love. Together they fought, till one was alive. The knight sadly wept, no king had survived. The answers to riddles, to secrets and more, Are found in the middle of legends and love. Seek out the answer, and learn if you can The face of regret, the life of a man.

Insipid writer, you pretend to draw for your readers The portraits of your 3 impostors; How is it that, witlessly, you have become the fourth? Why, poor enemy of the supreme essence, Do you confuse Mohammed and the Creator, And the deeds of man with God, his author?... Criticize the servant, but respect the master. God should not suffer for the stupidity of the priest: Let us recognize this God, although he is poorly served. My lodging is filled with lizards and rats; But the architect exists, and anyone who denies it Is touched with madness under the guise of wisdom. Consult Zoroaster, and Minos, and Solon, And the martyr Socrates, and the great Cicero: They all adored a master, a judge, a father. This sublime system is necessary to man. It is the sacred tie that binds society, The first foundation of holy equity, The bridle to the wicked, the hope of the just. If the heavens, stripped of his noble imprint, Could ever cease to attest to his being, If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Let the wise man announce him and kings fear him. Kings, if you oppress me, if your eminencies disdain The tears of the innocent that you cause to flow, My avenger is in the heavens: learn to tremble. Such, at least, is the fruit of a useful creed.

That's bullshit, buddy. And you know it. The trouble was, he DIDN'T know it. He had come face to face with something Susannah had found out for herself after shooting the bear: he could TALK about how he didn't want to be a gunslinger, how he didn't want to be tramping around this crazy world where the three of them seemed to be the only human life, that what he really wanted more than anything else was to be standing on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, popping his fingers, munching a chili-dog, and listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival blast out of his Walkman earphones as he watched the girls go by, those ultimately sexy New York girls with their pouty go-to-hell mouths and their long legs in short skirts. He could talk about those things until he was blue in the face, but his heart knew other things. It knew that he had ENJOYED blowing the electronic menagerie back to glory, at least while the game was on and Roland's gun was his own private handheld thunderstorm. He had ENJOYED kicking the robot rat, even though it had hurt his foot and even though he had been scared shitless. In some weird way, that part--the being scared part--actually seemed to add to the enjoyment. All that was bad enough, but his heart knew something even worse: that if a door leading back to New York appeared in front of him right now, he might not walk through it. Not, at least, until he had seen the Dark Tower for himself. He was beginning to believe that Roland's illness was a communicable disease.

No one believed that the author was the Chinese who received the prize. At the end of the last century, fleeing the scourge of yellow fever that devastated Panama during the construction of the railroad between the two oceans, he had arrived with many others who stayed here until they died, living in Chinese, reproducing in Chinese, and looking so much alike that no one could tell one from the other. At first, there were no more than ten, some of them with their wives and children and edible dogs, but in a few years, four narrow streets in the slums along the port were overflowing with other unexpected Chinese, who came into the country without leaving a trace in the customs record....In the popular view, they were divided into two kinds: bad Chinese and good Chinese. The bad ones were the ones in the lugubrious restaurants along the water front where one was as likely to eat like a King as to die a sudden death at the table, sitting before a plate of rat meat with sunflowers, and which were thought to be nothing more than fronts for white slavery, and many other kinds of trafficking. The good ones were the Chinese in the laundries, heirs of a sacred knowledge, who returned one's shirts cleaner than new, with collars and cuffs like recently ironed communion wafers.

With hardly a pause she moved on again, questing. Next it was a small fish . . . then another frog . . . and then a real prize: a water-rat that squeaked and writhed and tried to bite. She crushed the life out of it and stuffed it into her mouth, paws and all. A moment later she bent her head down and regurgitated the waste – a twisted mass of fur and splintered bones. Show him this, then – always assuming that he and Jake get back from whatever adventure they’re on, that is. And say, ‘I know that women are supposed to have strange cravings when they carry a child, Eddie, but doesn’t this seem a little too strange? Look at her, questing through the reeds and ooze like some sort of human alligator. Look at her and tell me she’s doing that in order to feed your child. Any human child.’ Still he would argue. Roland knew it. What he didn’t know was what Susannah herself might do when Roland told her she was growing something that craved raw meat in the middle of the night. And as if this business wasn’t worrisome enough, now there was todash. And strangers who had come looking for them. Yet the strangers were the least of his problems. In fact, he found their presence almost comforting. He didn’t know what they wanted, and yet he did know. He had met them before, many times. At bottom, they always wanted the same thing.

If you’re at work in the laundry or the plate-shop, you’re assigned five minutes of each hour when you can go to the bathroom. For thirty-five years, my time was twenty-five minutes after the hour, and after thirty-five years, that’s the only time I ever felt the need to take a piss or have a crap; twenty-five minutes past the hour. And if for some reason I couldn’t go, the need would pass at thirty after, and come back at twenty-five past the next hour. I think Andy may have been wrestling with that tiger—that institutional syndrome—and also with the bulking fears that all of it might have been for nothing. How many nights must he have lain awake under his poster, thinking about that sewer line, knowing that the one chance was all he’d ever get? The blueprints might have told him how big the pipe’s bore was, but a blueprint couldn’t tell him what it would be like inside that pipe—if he would be able to breathe without choking, if the rats were big enough and mean enough to fight instead of retreating . . . and a blueprint couldn’t’ve told him what he’d find at the end of the pipe, when and if he got there. Here’s a joke even funnier than the parole would have been: Andy breaks into the sewer line, crawls through five hundred yards of choking, shit-smelling darkness, and comes up against a heavy-gauge mesh screen at the end of it. Ha, ha, very funny.

He would have known or found out that the sewer-pipe running out of Cellblock 5 was the last one in Shawshank not hooked into the new waste-treatment plant, and he would have known it was do it by mid-1975 or do it never, because in August they were going to switch us over to the new waste-treatment plant, too. Five hundred yards. The length of five football fields. Just shy of half a mile. He crawled that distance, maybe with one of those small Penlites in his hand, maybe with nothing but a couple of books of matches. He crawled through foulness that I either can’t imagine or don’t want to imagine. Maybe the rats scattered in front of him, or maybe they went for him the way such animals sometimes will when they’ve had a chance to grow bold in the dark. He must have had just enough clearance at the shoulders to keep moving, and he probably had to shove himself through the places where the lengths of pipe were joined. If it had been me, the claustrophobia would have driven me mad a dozen times over. But he did it. At the far end of the pipe they found a set of muddy footprints leading out of the sluggish, polluted creek the pipe fed into. Two miles from there a search party found his prison uniform—that was a day later. The story broke big in the papers, as you might guess, but no one within a fifteen-mile radius of the prison stepped forward to report a stolen car, stolen clothes, or a naked man in the moonlight. There was not so much as a barking dog in a farmyard. He came out of the sewer-pipe and he disappeared like smoke. But I am betting he disappeared in the direction of Buxton.

We killed them all when we came here. The people came and burned their land The forests where they used to feed We burned the trees that gave them shade And burned to bush, to scrub, to heath We made it easier to hunt. We changed the land, and they were gone. Today our beasts and dreams are small As species fall to time and us But back before the black folk came Before the white folk’s fleet arrived Before we built our cities here Before the casual genocide, This was the land where nightmares loped And hopped and ran and crawled and slid. And then we did the things we did, And thus we died the things we died. We have not seen Diprotodon A wombat bigger than a room Or run from Dromornithidae Gigantic demon ducks of doom All motor legs and ripping beaks A flock of geese from hell’s dark maw We’ve lost carnivorous kangaroo A bouncy furrier T Rex And Thylacoleo Carnifex the rat-king-devil-lion-thing the dropbear fantasy made flesh. Quinkana, the land crocodile Five metres long and fast as fright Wonambi, the enormous snake Who waited by the water-holes and took the ones who came to drink who were not watchful, clever, bright. Our Thylacines were tiger-wolves until we drove them off the map Then Megalania: seven meters of venomous enormous lizard... and more, and more. The ones whose bones we’ve never seen. The megafauna haunt our dreams. This was their land before mankind Just fifty thousand years ago. Time is a beast that eats and eats gives nothing back but ash and bones And one day someone else will come to excavate a heap of stones And wonder, What were people like? Their teeth weren’t sharp. Their feet were slow. They walked Australia long ago before Time took them into tales We’re transients. The land remains. Until its outlines wash away. While night falls down like dropbears don’t to swallow up Australia Day.

Briefcase Crunch time. To escape the gravity of Jupiter, a spacecraft would have to travel over 134,000 miles per hour! Compare that to how fast space shuttles have to travel to clear the earth’s gravity–seven miles a second, or about 25,000 miles per hour. Get too close to Jupiter, and you’re not coming back! People are made for gravity. Astronauts in space have a great time floating around without gravity. But weightlessness eventually does bad things to bones and blood. Space experiments on rats in spinning cages (kind of like the centrifuge in our story, only not as dizzying) showed animals that got just a little gravity in space came back much healthier. Even before the Internet, people in Bible times had a pretty good idea of who set up the earth and the stars. Check out this psalm, written by King David nearly one thousand years before Jesus was born: “I think about the heavens. I think about what your fingers have created. I think about the moon and stars that you have set in place. What is a human being that you think about him? What is a son of man that you take care of him?” (Psalm 8:3 - 4).

Close your circle Poppy, tight, like a noose on a rat. Protect your heart like a guard dog, cause people have lost their minds Poppy, like sheep they've gone astray. Out in the wilderness. But you've been found. Shine the light cause its a dark world, but you don't have to face it alone. Aww, Ma Mae, you always know what to say. That was actually sweet. Poppy went to embrace her mother but Ma Mae put out her hand in resistence. No hugs, you know I'm not a hugger. How can you be a southern woman and not hug? Lotsa experience hugging the wrong people.