“Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.”
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet
Letter to Bolingbroke (March 21, 1729); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
English Fairy Tales (1890), More English Fairy Tales (1894), Pied Piper
“Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.”
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet
Letter to Bolingbroke (March 21, 1729); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“Not every pigeon is a rat with wings. Not every rat with wings is a dove of peace.”
Giannina Braschi (1953) Puerto Rican writer
Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist
Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.14.
Context: Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company... When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.
“That secret was a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing fell into.”
Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 71
“Jump in a hole without looking, and there’ll be a snake in it every time.”
Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer
Hurin
(15 November 1990)
Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
"On Memory".
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)
“Rats in paradise! Rats in paradise!”
Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician
Song lyrics, Mutiny (1993), Mutiny in Heaven