Scheiss Weekly

Mamacita says: By popular demand – and I really had no idea I was popular at all – here are the answers to the literature quiz of a few weeks ago.  I would have posted this sooner, but teachers asked me to wait a little while as they were using this post in their classes.  I’ve never been so flattered in my life.

Here it is, this time with the answers.  Please note that I did not ask for an author, only a title.  If you want the authors, you’ll either have to do some googling,  wait a little while longer, or ask a young reader.

Few pieces of literature cut to the chase quite as well or as thoroughly as good young people’s literature. Then again, what kind of audience could possibly most deserve to have excellent literature at its disposal? Everyone deserves good lit, but if an audience isn’t hooked while young, they’re not as likely to start when they’re older.

You know, kind of like drugs. Maybe libraries could take a few hints from dealers: get ’em when they’re young and they’re yours for life. That’s also something the Catholic Church says, but I didn’t want to offend anyone. Our schools used to do this, but they’re too busy drilling for standardized tests now; besides, they’re too worried about possibly offending someone to risk allowing good children’s or YA literature in the classrooms.  It’s true that many older children’s and YA books are politically incorrect, but that’s just the way things were back then.  If you can’t deal with that, there’s something lacking in YOU, not the book.  Take it in its proper context, for crying out loud.

Kids have no trouble with context; explain to a child that a story happened long ago, when people thought and acted differently, and the child will nod and accept that, and enjoy the story in spite of ADULTS who don’t know how to separate THEN from NOW and don’t believe you know how, either.

Stupid adults ruin everything.

Encourage your kids to read.  Read in front of them.  Show reluctance to put your book down.  Act enthusiastic about whatever you’re reading.  Treat a trip to the library with the same gung-ho and anticipation that you show when you’re on your way to a sporting event.  It’s not hard, if you really want your kids to be readers.

Readers have bigger and better vocabularies than non-readers, and the more words we know, the less likely we are to be taken advantage of or cheated, and the more difficult it can be to boss us around. Readers are better communicators. Readers know more stuff, plain and simple. Readers also, usually, have more self-control, because they have more ways to communicate their feelings.  Readers seldom lower themselves to the level of physical fighting, unless they’re forced into it, usually by a kid whose lack of reading expertise contributes to his lack of communication skills, leading him, in his frustration, to strike out in the only way he knows how: with his fists.

Now, where did these quotations come from? Some are very simple; others might require the assistance of an actual child or young adult. Some are fiction; some are non-fiction.  Some are quite old; some are quite recent.  Some are from novels; some are from other genres.  It’s a very eclectic mix.  Enjoy.

1. To die will be an awfully big adventure. (Peter Pan)

2. Tut, tut, child! Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it. (Alice in Wonderland)

3. And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?  (Anne of Green Gables)

4. Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it. (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer)

5. In the jungle, life and food depend on keeping your temper. (The Jungle Book)

6. No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.  (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz)

7. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.  (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

8. We should regret our mistakes and learn from them, but never carry them forward into the future with us.  (Anne of Avonlea)

9. Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another. (The Adventure of the Speckled Band)

10. There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast it is all a sham . . . .  (Black Beauty)

11. And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.  (The Call of the Wild)

12. It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.  (A Christmas Carol)

13. I had considered how the things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished.  (David Copperfield)

14. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.  (Gulliver’s Travels)

15. Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.  (Jane Eyre)

16. It seems I’m going to have to tamper with your memory.  (Twilight)

17. I never wanted to go away, and the hard part now is the leaving you all. I’m not afraid, but it seems as if I should be homesick for you even in heaven.  (Little Women)

18. Instead of always harping on a man’s faults, tell him of his virtues. Try to pull him out of his rut of bad habits. Hold up to him his better self, his REAL self that can dare and do and win out!  (Pollyanna)

19. Within him, as he hurled himself forward, was born a love, a despairing fondness for this flag which was near him. It was a creation of beauty and invulnerability. It was a goddess, radiant, that bended its form with an imperious gesture to him. It was a woman, red and white, hating and loving, that called him with the voice of his hopes.  (The Red Badge of Courage)

20. One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts–just mere thoughts–are as powerful as electric batteries–as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.  (The Secret Garden)

21. Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING–absolutely nothing–half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.  (The Wind in the Willows)

22. You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.  (Oh, The Places You’ll Go)

23. If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.  (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

24. If enough people think of a thing and work hard enough at it, I guess it’s pretty nearly bound to happen, wind and weather permitting.  (By the Shores of Silver Lake)

25. Like and equal are not the same thing at all!  (A Wrinkle in Time)

26. . . .his remark to his wife that night was simply to the effect that whenever the child looked at him she knocked him galley-west.  (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm)

27. He needed to save his energy for the people who counted.  (Holes)

28. Anything can happen if you let it.  (Mary Poppins)

29. Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere.  (Goodnight Moon)

30. I wonder . . . if other girls had to be one of us, which of us they’d choose to be?  (Ballet Shoes)

31. Laugh and fear not, creatures. Now that you are no longer dumb and witless, you need not always be grave. For jokes as well as justice come in with speech.  (The Magician’s Nephew)

32. Oh, my sainted aunt! Don’t mention that disgusting stuff in front of me! Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It’s made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!  (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)

33. But, see, there really isn’t anything all that funny in the way Kurt Schraeder swiped Betty Ann from Mrs. Mulvaney’s desk, then stuffed her into his JanSport.  (Teen Idol)

34. One night, after thinking it over for some time, Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight.  (Harold and the Purple Crayon)

35. The boy grew. He grew and he grew and he grew. He grew until he was a teenager. He had strange friends and he wore strange clothes and he listened to strange music. Sometimes the mother felt like she was in a zoo!  (Love You Forever)

36. I meant what I said, and I said what I meant.
An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.   (Horton Hatches the Egg)

37. Inside the box lay all the accouterments of another life. In its skin-covered depths was all the equipment of an entirely different world. They were symbols of things in life to come. They represented the future in which she would some day live.  (A Lantern in Her Hand)

38. I’ve heard it said that God is in the details. It’s the same with the truth. Leave out the details, the crucial heart, and you can damn someone with the bare bones of it.  (A Great and Terrible Beauty)

39. She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure who she was. It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.  (Coraline)

40. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.  (Ramona the Pest)

41. I don’t like to embarrass anyone by having them be seen talking to me.  (The Cat Ate My Gymsuit)

42. If you ever get in real trouble, don’t panic. Sit down and think about it. Remember two things, always. There must be some way out of it and there must be humor in it somewhere.  (Harriet the Spy)

43. I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.  (Diary of a Young Girl)

44. There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.  (Watership Down)

45. It is strange people should be so greedy, when they are alone in the world!  (Wuthering Heights)

46. Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.  (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings)

47. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.  (To Kill A Mockingbird)

48. My heart got to thumping. You can’t reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.  (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court)

49. Well, he certainly is very agreeable, and I give you leave to like him. You have liked many a stupider person.  (Pride and Prejudice)

50. Once you begin being naughty, it is easier to go and on and on, and sooner or later something dreadful happens.  (On the Banks of Plum Creek)

How many do you know?  Let us all see your answers in the comments!

(So.  How did you do?)