Goodreads is a website where people can share book recommendations and information. (The largest website of its kind in the world according to the website owners.) One feature of this particular website is a section where quotes from particular books are listed. So naturally I wanted to audit the accuracy of Pooh quotes specifically attributed to the 1926 edition of the original "Winnie-the-Pooh" by A. A. Milne. Once I removed duplicates and quotations from non-English translations, I was left with 64 quotes for evaluation. Of these 64 quotes only 52% (i.e. 33 quotes) were actual direct quotes from "Winnie-the-Pooh" (Milne, 1926). Another 3% (i.e. two quotes) I'll give partial credit for - recognizable as quotes from this book but where people had taken some liberties with the exact wording. Of the remaining 45% not from "Winnie-the-Pooh", 11 were from "House at Pooh Corner", (which, I feel obliged to add, is a different book, and even then seven of these 11 quotes had significant liberties taken with the exact wording), two were from the Disney movie "Pooh's Grand Adventure" (1997), two were from the movie "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" (1977), leaving a grand 14 quotes (just over one fifth of all those listed) that were not from any Milne publication nor Disney movie. No wonder people get confused.
Correct! (...at least the second part.) From the beginning of Chapter 6 in "The House at Pooh Corner" (1928) the full quote is: By the time it came to the edge of the Forest the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, "There is no hurry. We shall get there some day." But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.
A game of Poohsticks ensues. From allinspiration.com, the devastatingly inspirational Pooh quote "No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature." There is a tendency on the Net to attribute this quote to A. A. Milne. Even in ostensibly academic texts such as Baer, Kaufman, & Baumeister's "Are we free? Psychology and free will" (2008, published by Oxford University Press, p.312) Milne is presented as the progenitor of this quote. However, I have my suspicions. Where and when Milne was supposed to have said or written this is never reported. Nonetheless, this is definitely not something Pooh ever muttered to Piglet to deal with his general Woozle-related anxieties. Can't wait to see this one as a wall decal to put in a newborns bedroom.
Postscript: 1/3/15. This quote has been niggling at me for the last three months. I've finally got back to doing some more Internet mining, and have come up with a published source which directly links it to Milne. This quote does indeed appear in an essay by Milne entitled "Intellectual Snobbery", which probably first appeared in the magazine Punch (although I can't quite confirm the exact year, issue, and page number) but which definitely appeared in a collection of Milne essays entitled "Not That It Matters" (published 1920) - a free copy of which can be download from the Project Gutenburg website. It was also reproduced in the American magazine Littell's Living Age (published August 23, 1919, p. 462-463), a full pdf of which can be sourced here. So definitely Milne; definitely not Pooh. Phew! Now I can sleep again. The more I think about it, the weirder i think this Pooh misquote is. Here's one to stick above your baby's crib. However, given that your baby is probably (let's say) 29 years younger than you, this wall decal is a romantic declaration that if your baby lives to 100, you're hoping you're going to die when your child is 70 years old as that is the age they'll be when you're 99. You know what I think is romantic? Maths. Also: not having suicide pacts with your baby. (On another note: this website can deliver suicide pact wall decals to Yemen but not Zimbabwe.)
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