Alley Quotes

“Listen, I would say, this is not how I thought our lives would go; and may be we cannot find our way out of this alley. But there is no one I'd rather be lost with.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

“Like my loved one, I am convinced that we all have critical conditions. Battles that we undertake behind the hospitals, in lonely alleys, secret locations and sometimes public places that are out of reach to those who seem to care.”
― Phindiwe Nkosi, Behind the Hospital

“Dark alleys, like social networks, are romantic, because you never know what might happen while I perform there every Caturday night. Cats do know, but won't tell. So don’t even ask.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“Backpackers can pack much more meows than baggers. Beggars never feed stray cats as street cats are self-sustaining.”
― Will Advise

“Gifford Ulrich didn’t know the distance from despair to hope, but he knew hope didn’t sleep in alleys.”
― Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants

“To understand this new frontier, I will have to try to master one of the most difficult and counterintuitive theories ever recorded in the annals of science: quantum physics. Listen to those who have spent their lives immersed in this world and you will have a sense of the challenge we face. After making his groundbreaking discoveries in quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg recalled, "I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?" Einstein declared after one discovery, "If it is correct it signifies the end of science." Schrödinger was so shocked by the implications of what he'd cooked up that he admitted, "I do not like it and I am sorry I had anything to do with it." Nevertheless, quantum physics is now one of the most powerful and well-tested pieces of science on the books. Nothing has come close to pushing it off its pedestal as one of the great scientific achievements of the last century. So there is nothing to do but to dive headfirst into this uncertain world. Feynman has some good advice for me as I embark on my quest: "I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.”
― Marcus du Sautoy, The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science

“Alvin lifted his toes and pushed both heels firmly into the asphalt until his folding metal chair thudded familiarly against the brick wall behind him. It did so in the same manner as on myriad other occasions. A manner that had caused his mother to scold him more times than he cared to remember. She had stopped bothering to do so months earlier however. By then, he'd transferred more beige paint to the bricks behind him than remained on the crossbar at the top of its backrest.

At least that's what she told him soon before giving up. She would have likely been correct too, if not for the rain which so frequently showered the very same wall. In Alvin's keen mind, it was better this way. Once some unblemished new thing had lost its perfection he reasoned, it ceased posing a burden of concern ‒ particularly to observant mothers.”
― Monte Souder

“At first blush, an intersection of destinies is typically ordinary in circumstance and aloof of purpose. Akin to converging sets of footprints amidst a broad, grassy field additionally populated by clover, bull thistle, chickweed, ragwort, stinging nettles, dandelion, nut sedge, wild violet and so on – expanding outward in every direction whilst residual traces to whence they came fade behind rising whispers from unseen muses in meadows untrodden.

Dear reader, you must therefore know that each and every circumstance, detail, fact or matter that is fated to be confessed throughout this telling (sometimes involving rats, sometimes not), may well bear the seed of an interesting purpose indeed ‒ being hitherto cloistered in shadow.”
― Monte Souder

“Yet, even a foregoing detail of great bearing ought not hasten itself into a story but rather find its place with quiet subtlety – akin to the proper boiling of a live frog – thereby enabling its reader to develop a budding regard toward the present circumstance. Only by increments can insight be gathered from a narrative’s historical context or inferred about the crucial predicaments of its characters – ideally in service to an evolving sense of appreciation for the grander designs underpinning these connections.

This is so whether they be a knight and a dragon to be slayed; a princess and a frog to be collected – whose near-term fate anticipates an enchanted kiss, rather than a gradual scalding to death. Or perhaps manifest through a pied-piping, rat-hypnotizing, vagabond – who happened upon a town besieged of the elongate-tailed rodents – being ordained to beguile their mischief into following his lead into the river Weser.

Wherein each of them – save for a single lucky exception – would fail to grasp its plight in time to escape becoming swept away in its current. A lone survivor who, in Robert Browning’s poetic adaptation, “Swam across and lived to carry, to Rat-land home his commentary” as regards the fragility of existence and so urging his comrades to live whilst alive.

Oh rats, rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast dry-saltery!
So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!’

It doesn’t end there however as after being cheated of his agreed upon compensation, the piper returned to lead the town’s unsuspecting children away. In its original form they meet the same aquatic demise as did the rats.

An entire town’s worth of promis'd joy – gone, just like that.”
― Monte Souder

“If in a more contemporary – and of course nocturnal – moment, one were to gaze celestial-ward and focus among the 300 stars which shine most brightly, they would typically be viewing an object that is coincidentally located nearly 400 light years aloft. This, in contrast to our sun’s rays which bide their transit to visual awareness for a mere 8 minutes and 20 seconds.

Thus, the average image beheld will be yet occupying its existence at the conclusion of the Age of Discovery – meaning that its now moment will arrive on this orb well in advance of the glinting from the 150,000th yesterday of even the most conspicuously perceived of the 100 billion plus other stars coexisting this galaxy. To further simplify the matter, even if during this precise moment the scrutinized star were to core-collapse and become reborn as an invisible black hole, it would nonetheless – assuming averageness, as well as sufficient continuity of its gazer's lineage – persist as a celestial wonder under the watchful eye of one's prospective great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren. Then quite plausibly several generations beyond the last.

This of course, is taking into account only the nearest of them.

The most remote star visible to the naked eye from earth is approximately 10,000 light years away – commonly known as Rho Cassiopeiae if you’re the curious sort – and is not only 450 times larger but 500,000 times brighter than our sun. Stars can likewise be squeezed into a collective ball – or globular cluster – allowing one’s eyes to telescope across 25,000 light years. Yet even this is relatively like yesterday if considering that the Andromeda (the nearest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way) is also visible without optical aid in a moderately dark sky and projected to the earth’s surface as it was two-and-a-half million years ago – well before any human was around to gaze at all.

If one were to then ponder the outer limits of actual telescopes, ocular time travel suddenly leaps forward – or more technically hindward – to as many as four-and-a-half billion years; which incidentally, is the approximate age of this planet itself. In any case, once glancing skyward one will tend to become unconsciously immersed into an unknowably distant past, even while experiencing a deepened fixation on the present.

So too it is when becoming absorbed by the onset of a worthwhile story...”
― Monte Souder

“The incidental camouflage provided by his ashen coat against the tile flooring ‒ likewise denoted as being a series of twelve inch gray slate squares by all of them again ‒ save for Nate’s mother ‒ in concert with his current focus on the mixer and its hypnotic, simultaneous whir; which drew his visual attention to the blue pearl granite countertop directly in front of him and induced his total disregard for the feline's entrance.

He therefore failed to observe that it was marked by an inordinately determined gait ‒ itself relatively less peculiar than the paradoxical lack of conviction in his clenched jaws, out of which a visibly dispirited common brown rat was loosely dangling by the nape of its neck.

Upon shutting off the mixer and sensing a presence, Nate glanced intuitively downward ‒ just as Zero had raised his head sharply and looked up with eager, widened eyes ‒ then becoming struck by a sense that it appeared in the moment as if the incongruous mouser had been instead transporting an itsy-bitsy newborn kitten.

Then in the next, he casually dropped the rodent at his owner's feet.

Being sufficiently emboldened by its youthful size and appearance to first crouch and then kneel to the floor for a closer look, Nate endeavored to roust the lethargic rodent with a toothpick. He was taken aback to discover a set of tiny ‒ though notably bulging ‒ coal black eyes returning his gaze.

Their vacant helplessness inspired him toward an appreciably more sober contemplation of its plight than he’d undertaken upon witnessing Zero capture and kill a field mouse behind his apple tree the previous spring. An instance whereby he had caught but a fleeting glimpse of its limp body as his typically passive, then suddenly feral tomcat clamped down on its entire neck just prior to seeking a more private spot in which to consume his prey.

Nate realized that if he'd intended to eat this latest catch, his since neutered pet would have remained outside and carried it in a similar manner; so being the softhearted sort, while possessing a firm understanding that upon his mother's imminent arrival in a chic skirt with matching heels, the tragic scene of a dying and worse yet ‒ possibly bleeding ‒ brown Norway rat on her Montauk Blue tile flooring would be ill-received, he suffered the burden of understanding that this rodent's fate might be in his hands.”
― Monte Souder

“For one thing his was one of those crazy-big, creepy-looking rats with a super long-tail but I‘m nearly sure that it was just an older version of mine ‒ both being what they call common, sewer, brown or Norway rats among other names. He told me it was nearly two feet long if you count the tail ‒ which seems only fair. Mine ‒ well Z’s anyway ‒ isn’t even a third of that. I mean our rat, not our tails.

For another, his stayed outside where rats are supposed to stay and his cat ‒ though it was actually an alley cat he'd never even seen before ‒ did just what cats are supposed to do in such situations. He caught it and chomped down on its neck until it stopped moving or breathing ‒ then growled real low-like to let anyone who might have any ideas about stealing it know they'd best stay away.

Then right after that, his cat ran off with his rat like it was an order of takeout.”
― Monte Souder

“That familiar lane. Shall we walk there again? ...For memories curl in this autumn rain..”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee