Is there a certain quote, phrase or perhaps parable from a childhood story that your mind inadvertantly recollects at certain instances?

Whenever I hear somebody ask, “Would you ever try such and such?” I’m immediately drawn back to the Dr. Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham and at least one of the lines, such as, “Would you, could you, with a goat? Would you could you on a boat?”

That Dr. Seuss sounds like a bit of a perv! – And then I am reminded of the phrase, “To the pure all things are pure.”

I grew up listening to Jack Flanders radio dramas, so lines from that pop up in my mind all the time. Unfortunately no one my age (or indeed anyone I know outside my family) seems to have ever heard them, so no one ever knows what I’m talking about if i quote them.

Also, “Do a barrel roll!”

For whatever reason, this line from a Sue Grafton book has always stayed with me. Every time I see or hear about false eyelashes, it springs right into my head:

“The false eyelash lay alone in its case, like a wink.”

Quotes from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass show up for me a lot too, and quite a bit of Shakespeare shows up in my daily speech. As and actor, lines from shows I’ve been in come up from time to time.

Yes, one from a Peanuts comic book: Lucy snatches her brother Linus’s security blanket away from him and hides it. Linus goes through major withdrawal symptoms. Empathetic Charlie Brown offers a dishcloth as a substitute. Linus glares at him and says, “That’s like feeding a starving dog a rubber bone.”

It often comes to mind when anyone is dissatisfied with a substitute, like drinking a cup of decaf coffee when they really want caffeine.

I read a book of Aesop’s fables when I was young and the story of the fox and the grapes has always stuck with me and was a huge first insight in to human nature.

@FluffyChicken . . . I remember The Fourth Tower of Inverness and Moon Over Morocco.

and little rita and her cigars

Every time that the skies look dark and ominous I often think back to Whinnie the Pooh working with Christopher Robin trying to fake out a bunch of honey bees by having Pooh bear dress up as rain cloud with some sort of floating aparatus hovering over the honey tree.

In an effort to really convince the bees that Pooh bear is indeed a cloud and not a bear covered in soot, Christopher Robin is underneath the honey tree saying, “Tut, tut, looks like rain. Tut, tut.”

Unfortunately, his onomatopoeic efforts didn’t fool the bees. But whenever I feel the weather is about to take a turn for the drizzle, I’ll repeat Christopher Robins encouragement:

Tut tut, looks like rain.

My dad used to say he was gonna “beat us s’verely ‘bout the head a shoulders.” I think about that when ever I see kids acting up.

This probably isn’t a very nice thing to say, specially as several people have just been killed, but if im honest it’s 100% true.

Any time I see on the news that people in America (or anywhere else) have been killed by a tornado, or that a tornado has destroyed some houses, I always think of the three little pigs, and comment to my self how these people should have built their houses out of bricks instead of wood.

I don’t even know if brick houses would stand up to a tornado, maybe they would be even more dangerous than wood houses when cought in a tornado. I guess it is something that comes from my sense of disbelief that people insist on living in these places.

I seem to be using this one more and more these days…

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,

When something is hard to do or hard to bear (like a filling), ‘I think I can, I think I can’ pops into my head in an annoying supposed to be the Little Train voice. It was probably Romper Room, she never said she could see me either and I waited and waited. “Good Night, JimBob” pops into my head whenever saying good night to anyone.

I just sent someone the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf today. XD
Big ‘ol BS-er

“Some days are just like that, even in Australia.”
—Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Not book related but when ever I see anyone running who perhaps isn’t a natural runner, and for some reason especially a cow or sheep (i live in the country) I say Chandler’s line from Friends when he’s watching Baywatch. “Run, Yasmeen, run. Run like the wind”