Sewer Rat Quotes

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I always say the truth is best even when we find it unpleasant. Any rat in a sewer can lie. It's how rats are. It's what makes them rats. But a human doesn't run and hide in dark places, because he's something more. Lying is the most personal act of cowardice there is.
Nancy Farmer (The House of the Scorpion (Matteo Alacran, #1))
VLADIMIR: Moron! ESTRAGON: Vermin! VLADIMIR: Abortion! ESTRAGON: Morpion! VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat! ESTRAGON: Curate! VLADIMIR: Cretin! ESTRAGON: (with finality). Crritic! VLADIMIR: Oh! He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.
Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot)
Collectivism is the "philosophy" of every cockroach and sewer rat: "If I want it, I must need it, and if I need it, I have a right to it, and if I have a right to it, it doesn't matter what I have to do to get it." The fact that such an inherently animalistic, short-sighted, anti-human viewpoint is now painted by some as compassionate and "progressive" does not make it any more sane, or any less dangerous.
Larken Rose
Personally, if I were trying to discourage people from smoking, my sign would be a little different. In fact, I might even go too far in the opposite direction. My sign would say something like, "Smoke if you wish. But if you do, be prepared for the following series of events: First, we will confiscate your cigarette and extinguish it somewhere on the surface of your skin. We will then run you nicotine-stained fingers through a paper shredder and throw them into the street, where wild dogs will swallow them and then regurgitate them into the sewers, so that infected rats can further soil them before they're flushed out to sea with the rest of the city's filth. After such time, we will sysematically seek out your friends and loved one and destroy their lives." Wouldn't you like to see a sign like that?
George Carlin (When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?)
It’s not a good idea to jump into the sewer to catch a rat.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz (The Inexplicable Logic of My Life)
Humanity loses faith in times like that. With no one to look up to, no one to believe in, we all became rats scrounging in the sewers. Maybe Ace really was a villain. Or maybe he was a visionary. Maybe there’s not much of a difference.
Marissa Meyer (Renegades (Renegades, #1))
RATS. In sewers. In religions. In words like pirate, desperate, and narrative. Rats infest this glossary as surely as words and mushrooms.
Jeff Vandermeer (City of Saints and Madmen (Ambergris, #1))
Humanity loses faith in times like that. With no one to look up to, no one to believe in, We all become rats scrounging in the sewers.
Marissa Meyer (Renegades (Renegades, #1))
Forty feet long sixty feet high hotel Covered with old gray for buzzing flies Eye like mango flowing orange pus Ears Durga people vomiting in their sleep Got huge legs a dozen buses move inside Calcutta Swallowing mouthfuls of dead rats Mangy dogs bark out of a thousand breasts Garbage pouring from its ass behind alleys Always pissing yellow Hooghly water Bellybutton melted Chinatown brown puddles Coughing lungs Sound going down the sewer Nose smell a big gray Bidi Heart bumping and crashing over tramcar tracks Covered with a hat of cloudy iron Suffering water buffalo head lowered To pull the huge cart of year uphill
Allen Ginsberg
Sometimes it's good to be the smartest rat in the sewer.
Michael Houbrick (The Rat Pack of Hollywood Visits the State Fair)
The real point is this: We don't know where to go because we don't know what we are. Do you want to go back to living in a sewer-pipe? And eating other people's garbage? Because that's what rats do. But the fact is, we aren't rats anymore. We are something Dr. Schultz has made. Something new.
Robert C. O'Brien (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH)
I’m not being superficial but he actually looked like sewer rat guy from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Ayisha Malik (Sofia Khan is Not Obliged)
Bunny rabbits may not look like New York City sewer rats, but they’re still rodents.
Melissa Petreshock (Fire of Stars and Dragons (Stars and Souls, #1))
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?
Kalayna Price (Grave Dance (Alex Craft, #2))
If you hurt her, I will kill you.” She pointed her finger at me for emphasis. I was perfectly still, giving zero fucks about this five-foot-four gnome firing threats at me like she was Rambo. “Cock-blocking me first and threatening me? Should I remind you that the only reason you’re not living in a sewer with that rat who trains the Ninja Turtles is because of my generosity?” I
L.J. Shen (Vicious (Sinners of Saint, #1))
Why didn't you tell me this the moment we started talking?' 'Because I was busy returning my heart to a normal level after you emerged from the shadows like a sewer rat. After which you conjured chips and we've been arguing ever since.' 'We're not arguing.' 'Well, I certainly am. Which means you are, too.
Lucy Jane Wood (Rewitched (Rewitched, #1))
Because fascism is a movement of despair, while socialism is a movement of hope, to fight fascism it is necessary not only to fight the fascists but also the conditions that lead to despair. One has to fight the rats, but also the sewers in which the rats multiply. One has to fight the fascists, but also capitalism that creates conditions that breed fascism - unemployment, bad housing, social deprivation, etc.
Tony Cliff (عصر الثورة - الماركسية في الألفية الجديدة)
Humanity loses faith in times like that. With no one to look up to, no one to believe in, we all became rats scrounging in the sewers. Maybe Ace really was a villain. Or maybe he was a visionary. Maybe there's not much of a difference.
Marissa Meyer (Renegades (Renegades, #1))
But the people. The normal people. They were far worse. With no rule and no law, it became every man, woman, and child for themselves. There were no repercussions for crimes or violence—no one to run to if you were beaten or robbed. No police. No prisons. Not legitimate ones, anyway. Neighbors stole from neighbors. Stores were looted and supplies were hoarded, leaving children to starve in the gutters. It became the strong against the weak, and, as it turns out, the strong were usually jerks. Humanity loses faith in times like that. With no one to look up to, no one to believe in, we all became rats scrounging in the sewers.
Marissa Meyer (Renegades (Renegades, #1))
Dear Miss Tremor. You are smart and kind and pretty. I think you have really excellent stuff under your clothes and I would like to see it, please. Let's go on a date and get married and you can be my rodent queen in my castle in the sewer. Love always and forever, --Mouse. P.S. I am sorry my rats ate some of your candy.
Gail Simone (The Movement, Vol. 2: Fighting for the Future)
Respect was a big word in Linc's vocabulary. It meant being selective and paying attention to things that mattered and people who made differences. And respect for oneself meant being valuable enough to make sure they would notice you. That was the key to doing better than just getting by and surviving, which was something even the rats in the sewers under the city managed.
James P. Hogan (Outward Bound)
7. The monstrous rats of Tehran In Tehran, Iran, a squad of snipers is employed to protect citizens from – rats! Do not think for a single moment that such rats could be easily dealt with by a domestic cat, because the poor cat may this time end up having its rear side kicked big time. The official statement is that the rats were exposed to radiation, which resulted in a severe genetic mutation. They now grow up to over 5 kilograms (10 pounds), and are just as cunning, aggressive and always hungry as the small sewer rats we have all seen. Although there is a disagreement to their origins within the scientific community, there is really no evidence that would point to an explanation where the ravenous, overgrown rodents came from. Good thing they are not skilled in the far-eastern martial arts… we hope.
Tyler Backhause (101 Creepy, Weird, Scary, Interesting, and Outright Cool Facts: A collection of 101 facts that are sure to leave you creeped out and entertained at the same time)
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.
Stephen King (Different Seasons: Four Novellas)
On the playground, “cooties” seems harmless and innocuous (unless you’ve been on the other end of that game). But sociomoral disgust can quickly scale up in intensity and become the engine behind the very worst of human atrocities. During times of social stress or chaos, those persons or populations already associated with disgust properties will provide the community a location of blame, fear, and paranoia. In short, sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination. As David Gilmore writes in his book Monsters, a monster is “the demonization of the ‘Other’ in the image of the monster as a political device for scapegoating those whom the rules of society deem impure or unworthy - the transgressors and deviants.” These deviants are considered to be “deformed, amoral, [and] unsocialized to the point of inhumanness.” Take, for an example, the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, where an early shot in the film showed rats emerging from a sewer juxtaposed with a crowd of Jewish persons in a Polish city. In America, as another example, proponents of anti-gay legislation have circulated pamphlets claiming that gay men eat human feces and drink human blood. In each of these instances, sociomoral disgust is used to demonize and scapegoat populations, creating “monsters” who are threatening to society.
Richard Beck (Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality)
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.
Stephen King (Different Seasons: Four Novellas)
The Ballad of Harry Lime by Stewart Stafford Harry found existence overrated, And its shadow, morality, so outdated, Scurrying rats down here in the sewer, Porcine gluttons in punished manure. Grand aspirations from primordial slime, Lifting up the rock from time to time, Samson, destroying a temple of hypocrisy, And every pillar - hope, faith and charity, They'd had him from baptism's font, Trapped before wording his wants, A heel dipped in brackish liturgy, Silent collusion in mass duplicity. For those who remained in smoky rubble? Rudely awakened from a cocoon bubble: An obelisk erected to grotesque finance, Charon’s fee for a Stygian dance. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.
Stewart Stafford
I’m talking about people who live in some of our most affluent cities,’ says O’Casey, ‘but they’re driven to live below the earth. People who—for whatever reason—aren’t welcome on the surface: homeless people, addicts, the HIV positive. There are subterranean communities all over the world, in catacombs, sewers and abandoned metros. The Tunnel People in Las Vegas, the Empire of the Dead in Paris, the Rat Tribe in Beijing. A lot of them are proper societies, with electricity and phone lines, even churches and restaurants sometimes. The Rat Tribe in Beijing are mostly migrant workers, some of them brought in to build for the Olympics. The only place they can afford to live is underground, in tunnels and old air-raid shelters.
Elly Griffiths (The Chalk Pit (Ruth Galloway #9))
Nolan decided that was a good prompt to jump in. “Yeah! You shitbag fuck-monkey! Go gargle troll dicks, you puss-ridden waste of air! Your mother likes to get double teamed by forest giants! Your dad pays sewer rats to nibble on his junk!” Everyone stared down at the boy in silence. Even a few people walking by had stopped to stare at the kid.
WillPowah (Blood Shaper: The Splintered Five Saga (Outworlder's Blood #1))
Page 3: My family is part of the Philippines’ tiny but entrepreneurial, economically powerful Chinese minority. Just 1 percent of the population, Chinese Filipinos control as much as 60 percent of the private economy, including the country’s four major airlines and almost all of the country’s banks, hotels, shopping malls, and major conglomerates. ... Since my aunt’s murder, one childhood memory keeps haunting me. I was eight, staying at my family’s splendid hacienda-style house in Manila. It was before dawn, still dark. Wide awake, I decided to get a drink from the kitchen. I must have gone down an extra flight of stairs, because I literally stumbled onto six male bodies. I had found the male servants’ quarters. My family’s houseboys, gardeners, and chauffeurs—I sometimes imagine that Nilo Abique [the chauffeur that murdered her aunt] was among those men—were sleeping on mats on a dirt floor. The place stank of sweat and urine. I was horrified. Later that day I mentioned the incident to my Aunt Leona, who laughed affectionately and explained that the servants—there were perhaps twenty living on the premises, all ethnic Filipinos—were fortunate to be working for our family. If not for their positions, they would be living among rats and open sewers without even a roof over their heads. A Filipino maid then walked in; I remember that she had a bowl of food for my aunt’s Pekingese. My aunt took the bowl but kept talking as if the maid were not there. The Filipinos, she continued—in Chinese, but plainly not caring whether the maid understood or not—were lazy and unintelligent and didn’t really want to do much else. If they didn’t like working for us, they were free to leave any time. After all, my aunt said, they were employees, not slaves.
Amy Chua (World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability)
Whenever someone attractive crossed my path I seemed to be doing my best impression of a sewer rat.
M.J. Greenway (Sarah Starting Over (Starting Over #1))
Even if a rat dresses in Armani, the stink of the sewer is still all over him.
William Kent Krueger (Mercy Falls (Cork O'Connor, #5))
One does not have to believe in Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ to believe that man’s fall from grace came with city dwelling; it is common sense. Some cities might be prosperous and secure, with good land and a strong ruler; but they would be the exceptions. Most cities would be little more than large groups of human beings living together for convenience, like rats in a sewer. The consequence is obvious. Man ceases to be an instinctive, simple creature. Whether he likes it or not, he has to become more calculating to survive. He also has to become, in a very special sense, more aggressive—not simply towards other men but towards the world. Before this time, there had only been small Neolithic communities, whose size was limited by their ability to produce food. If the population increased too fast, the weaker ones starved. It encouraged a passive, peaceful attitude towards life and nature. Big cities were more prosperous because men had pooled their resources, and because certain men could afford to become ‘specialists’—in metalwork, weaving, writing and so on. And there were many ways to keep yourself alive: labouring, trading or preying on other men. Unlike the Neolithic community, this was a world where enterprise counted for everything. It would be no exaggeration to say that the ‘rat race’ began in 4000 B.C.
Colin Wilson (The Occult)
When a rat pokes his head up from the sewer, he needs to be hit on the head with a shovel immediately. You cannot just sit back and think, Well, it’s just one rat or That’s somebody else’s problem. Because it’s never just one rat, and it eventually becomes your problem.
Jake Tapper (The Hellfire Club)
The epidemic was at its worst in Belfast with one in every seven people succumbing to the fever. Donegal Street where we lived was one of the most affluent areas in town but at the foot of the street near the Linen Hall was one of Belfast’s most deprived areas know as the ‘Half Bap’. Here people lived some eight or more people to a house and there were houses backing on to each other with open sewers. It is also said that in the shebeens off York Street that people were so hungry they ate rats alive.
LEONORA MORRISON (Red Velvet Rose (Order of the Dragon Book 1))
The street was a sad state in daylight. Electric signs and red lights resisted the brightness of life, stripped of their luster in the colorless day. But in darkness and mist, they pulsed with vibrancy. The streets thrived in a cloak of obscurity, and men took comfort in anonymity. At night they were a motley bunch, a throng of shadowed faces and hungry eyes, milling about brothels and dance halls like rats roaming a sewer.
Sabrina Flynn (From the Ashes (Ravenwood Mysteries, #1))
The monster was shorter than her, like Ion, with a beak-like nose and stringy hair the colour of a sewer rat. The top of his head was bald and pocked with scars. He had the pallor of a man who never sees sunlight and his skin was always coated with grime. His teeth were yellow and gappy and his tongue was covered with a white layer.
Mark Edwards (Follow You Home)
You smell like a rotting walrus stewed in sewer water and set upon by a rabble of noxiously flatulent rats. You are not getting on my back smelling like that.” I smiled briefly in appreciation. Now that was how to insult someone.
Isla Frost (Dragons Are a Girl’s Best Friend (Fangs and Feathers, #1))
Even as wet as a sewer rat, Mia di Angelo is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
Grace Reilly (Stealing Home (Beyond the Play, #3))
There are subterranean communities all over the world, in catacombs, sewers and abandoned metros. The Tunnel People in Las Vegas, the Empire of the Dead in Paris, the Rat Tribe in Beijing.
Elly Griffiths (The Chalk Pit (Ruth Galloway #9))
When the Libyan uprising was first gathering steam, Qaddafi dismissed the protestors as “rats” and vowed to eradicate them with unmatched fury. Six months later, dirty and on the run, he was found by Libyan fighters hiding in a sewer pipe near the city of Sirte, begging his captors not to shoot him. They did not oblige. Tellingly, in a sign of broader trends across the region, on the day that Qaddafi’s palace in Tripoli fell to the rebels, the flag that was hoisted atop the building was that of Qatar, a sign, no doubt, of the tiny sheikhdom’s surprising reach and power. Qatar’s flag was soon replaced by Libya’s own new flag. But the symbolic importance of seeing the Qatari flag over Qaddafi’s one-time headquarters was hard to miss. A new regional power had risen.
Mehran Kamrava (Qatar: Small State, Big Politics)
As in all great cataclysmic events, men are forced to show their true colours. Some will achieve the status of legend for their courage, brilliance and dedication; some will possess all the same qualities unacknowledged; others will be plodders doing their best; and there will be those who will be what they have always been -- sewer rats.
Anne Rouen (Angel of Song (Master of Illusion #3))
station. I had a sinking feeling that our future lay somewhere inside one of these dark, gaping mouths. “Oh, I hope we don’t have to go mucking about in there,” said Olive. “Of course we do,” Enoch said. “It isn’t a proper holiday until we’ve plumbed every available sewer.” The pigeon bopped rightward. We started down the tracks. I hopscotched around an oily puddle and a legion of rats scurried away from my feet, sending Olive into Bronwyn’s arms with a shriek. The tunnel yawned before us, black and menacing. It occurred to me that this would be a very bad place to meet a hollowgast. Here there’d be no walls to climb, no houses to shelter in, no tomb lids to close behind us. It was long and straight and lit only by a few red bulbs, glinting feebly at scattered intervals. I walked faster. The darkness closed around us. When I was a kid, I used to play hide-and-seek with my dad. I was always the hider and he the seeker. I was really good at it, primarily because I, unlike most kids of four or five, had the then-peculiar ability to be extremely quiet for
Ransom Riggs (Hollow City (Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, # 2))
If you go into the sewer looking for friends all you'll find is snakes, rats and slim.
Marlan Rico Lee
Rats were eagerly eaten, and hard cabbage-stalk, with raw potato-peelings, which had been thrown into the sewers, was used for food.
Patricia B. Mitchell (Yanks, Rebels, Rats, and Rations: Scratching for Food in Civil War Prison Camps)
When a rat pokes his head up from the sewer, he needs to be hit on the head with a shovel immediately. You cannot just sit back and think, 'Well, it's just one rat' or 'That's somebody else's problem.' Because it's never just one rat, and it eventually becomes your problem.
Jake Tapper (The Hellfire Club)
I had only had a few days in Tokyo this time. But that was long enough to get used to its ways again — stations where you never have to wait, trains that are never late, telephones that never break down, shop girls who bow to you and smile. It all went together with the high tech facade of the place, the insistent newness of it, the looming skyscrapers and streets crowded with people in chic black or sewer-rat grey, all inexplicably in a hurry. In the countryside, on the other hand, no-one was in a hurry. ‘Countryside’, actually, is rather a mistranslation. Inaka really means anywhere that is not Tokyo — the provinces, in other words, the boondocks, the sticks.
Lesley Downer (On the Narrow Road to the Deep North)
Danny wanted to live alone because he was a serial killer. He’d read that you were supposed to start small and work your way up to killing human prey. Torture and kill animals first. But Danny loved animals, and if he ever hurt a dog or a cat he would’ve been filled with self-loathing. He’d thought about maybe torturing and killing a greasy sewer rat, but he had no way to obtain one, and the mouse he got from the pet store looked at him with its tiny little loving eyes and he had to set it free. So he went straight to killing humans.
Jeff Strand (Twentieth Anniversary Screening)
And while the sewers of Prague provide the scene for a senseless war between two armies of rats, the cellars are headquarters for Prague’s fallen angels, university-educated men who have lost a battle they never fought, yet continue to work toward a clearer image of the world.
Bohumil Hrabal (Too Loud a Solitude)
– Did you know that some machines dream, Otto? The digital chimeras – even without a mouth, I know Orion is smiling. – Before you woke me up, I was dreaming. I dreamed of a human who promises to entwine his girlfriend, and that she would swallow the moon and white lightning would come out from the tips of her hair. This dream has no color, it is in black and white. While you were sleeping in The Rats’ Sewer, I dreamed of a lonely robot who lives collecting forgettings. This dream is colorful, joyful. When I am turned off, I can see things that don’t exist.
Ian Fraser
He tilts his head. “You look like a rat out of the sewer.
Rina Kent (Ruthless Empire (Royal Elite, #6))