Peter Rabbit Quotes

Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were--Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter.

As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn't say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.

...she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.

Mr. McGregor's a nasty piece of work, isn't he? Quite the Darth Vader of children's literature.

All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife. . . . Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.

Peter Rabbit, for all its gentle tininess, loudly proclaims that no story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it is not a work of imagination.

Mom had the kind of love for her that you could feel, like it was part of the atmosphere

Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed, and made some chamomile tea: "One table-spoonful to be taken at bedtime.

I am aware these little books don't last long even if they are a success.

This one day her mother gave her a basket of wine and cake to take to her grandmother because she was ill. Wine and cake? Where's the aspirin? The penicillin? Where's the fruit juice? Peter Rabbit got camomile tea. But wine and cake it was.

Peter lost one of his shoes among the cabbages, and the other shoe amongst the potatoes.

Growing up, I loved the tale of Peter Rabbit and also books on Pippi Longstocking. Pippi was a girl who had so much fun and was very daring. My sons loved all the Dr. Seuss books

I am sorry to say that Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed, and made some camomile tea; and she gave a dose of it to Peter! 'One table-spoonful to be taken at bed-time.' But Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail had bread and milk and blackberries for supper.

Gregors’, ‘Greggs’ or ‘The Maccy-Gs’ are all rabbit slang for law enforcement agents, named after Mr McGregor, the villain in the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit books. In the dubbed-into-Rabbity version of Star Wars, Darth Vader is literally translated as ‘Mr McGregor’.

Ingrid shrugged...like Marie Antoinette hearing about the starving peasants.

Unicorns are immortal. It is their nature to live alone in one place: usually a forest where there is a pool clear enough for them to see themselves-for they are a little vain, knowing themselves to be the most beautiful creatures in all the world, and magic besides. They mate very rarely, and no place is more enchanted than one where a unicorn has been born. The last time she had seen another unicorn the young virgins who still came seeking her now and then had called to her in a different tongue; but then, she had no idea of months and years and centuries, or even of seasons. It was always spring in her forest, because she lived there, and she wandered all day among the great beech trees, keeping watch over the animals that lived in the ground and under bushes, in nests and caves, earths and treetops. Generation after generation, wolves and rabbits alike, they hunted and loved and had children and died, and as the unicorn did none of these things, she never grew tired of watching them.

As for you and your heart and the things you said and the didn't say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.

As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn’t say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit Table of Contents

The soaring mountains rose around her, and the poets’ waters glittered beneath her in the valleys of memory—hosts of golden daffodils, Swallows and Amazons, Peter Rabbit. She

Agriculture makes people dependent on a few domesticated crops and animals instead of hundreds of wild food sources, creating vulnerability to droughts and blights and zoonotic diseases. Agriculture makes for sedentary living, leaving humans to do something that no primate with a concern for hygiene and public health would ever do: namely, living in close proximity to their feces. Agriculture makes for surplus and thus almost inevitably, the uneven distribution of surplus generating socio-economic status differences that dwarf anything that other primates cook up with their hierarchies. And from there it's just a hop, skip and a jump until we've got Mr. McGregor persecuting Peter Rabbit and people incessantly singing Oklahoma.

Peter had stolen a knife. We were seven years old, and we'd caught a rabbit in a trap. We looked at each other darkly, a look I'll never forget, one of a shared savage thrill, like young wolves taking down their first kill. A spill of blood issued from the rabbits neck, a quick red streak across pristine white fur, slow enough to be cruel. I hadn't cut deep enough. Had I wanted to spare its life or prolong its misery? I've never wanted to know the answer.

It took Lucy forty hours to die and we hardly left her side. . . .We spent those last hours kissing her frequently and telling her how deeply we loved her. Then I began to read Leah’s children’s books out loud to her. She had lived a storyless childhood, so I read in the last day of her life the books she had missed. I told her about Winnie the Pooh and Yertle the Turtle, took her Where the Wild Things Are, introduced her to Peter Rabbit and Alice in Wonderland. Each of us took turns reading to her out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and, at the very last, Leah insisted that I tell all the Great Dog Chippie stories I had told her during our year of exile from the family in Rome.

It was a meal that we shall never forget; more accurately, it was several meals that we shall never forget, because it went beyond the gastronomic frontiers of anything we had ever experienced, both in quantity and length. It started with homemade pizza - not one, but three: anchovy, mushroom, and cheese, and it was obligatory to have a slice of each. Plates were then wiped with pieces torn from the two-foot loaves in the middle of the table, and the next course came out. There were pates of rabbit, boar, and thrush. There was a chunky, pork-based terrine laced with marc. There were saucissons spotted with peppercorns. There were tiny sweet onions marinated in a fresh tomato sauce. Plates were wiped once more and duck was brought in... We had entire breasts, entire legs, covered in a dark, savory gravy and surrounded by wild mushrooms. We sat back, thankful that we had been able to finish, and watched with something close to panic as plates were wiped yet again and a huge, steaming casserole was placed on the table. This was the specialty of Madame our hostess - a rabbit civet of the richest, deepest brown - and our feeble requests for small portions were smilingly ignored. We ate it. We ate the green salad with knuckles of bread fried in garlic and olive oil, we ate the plump round crottins of goat's cheese, we ate the almond and cream gateau that the daughter of the house had prepared. That night, we ate for England.

But how can you be Peter Pan? You? The Boy Who Never Grew Up? That's not you. You have egg on your collar. You can't fly. You're not Alice. Alice was a blond little girl, I know it. You're lying to me.' And then they remember. What growing up really is: when they learned that boys can't fly and mermaids don't exist and White Rabbits don't talk and all boys grow old, even Peter Pan, as you've grown old. They've been deceived. As if you've somehow been lying to them. So following hard on the smile of remembrance is the pain in the eyes, which you've caused, everytime you meet someone.

The bigger the crime, Holmes said, the more obvious the motive. That was one of his basic rules.

But round the end of a cucumber frame, whom should he meet but Mr. McGregor!

Presently Peter sneezed "Kertyschoo!

Through the words on the page she followed Alice down rabbit holes and Dorothy into tornados, solved mysteries alongside Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew, flew with Peter to Neverland, and made a wonderful journey to a Mushroom Planet. Her family was reasonably well-off, and there was no shortage of books, either through the shops or the library, which seemed to be entirely without limits.

Christ, you could massacre half a Hindu village and still look like Peter Rabbit. What are you stuffed with?” “Chocolate bars. And I keep six kinds of ice-cream in my icebox, when I can afford it.

Sonia smiles at me when I tuck her under the sheets. As usual, there’s no bedtime story, no exploring Dora, no Pooh and Piglet, no Peter Rabbit and his misadventures in Mr. McGregor’s lettuce patch. It’s frightening what she’s grown to accept as normal.

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it’s tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world’s fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman’s shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit’s cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black.

Even when a prohibition in a fairy-story is guessed to be derived from some taboo once practised long ago, it has probably been preserved in the later stages of the tale's history because of the great mythical significance of prohibition. A sense of significance may indeed have lain behind some of the taboos themselves. Thou shalt not - or else thou shalt depart beggared into endless regret. The gentlest 'nursery-tales' know it. Even Peter Rabbit was forbidden a garden, lost his blue coat, and took sick. The Locked Door stands as an eternal Temptation.

He was becoming an effective human being. He had learned from his birth family how to snare rabbits, make stew, paint fingernails, glue wallpaper, conduct ceremonies, start outside fires in a driving rain, sew with a sewing machine, cut quilt squares, play Halo, gather, dry, and boil various medicine teas. He had learned from the old people how to move between worlds seen and unseen. Peter taught him how to use an ax, a chain saw, safely handle a .22, drive a riding lawn mower, drive a tractor, even a car. Nola taught him how to paint walls, keep animals, how to plant and grow things, how to fry meat, how to bake. Maggie taught him how to hide fear, fake pain, how to punch with a knuckle jutting. How to go for the eyes. How to hook your fingers in a person’s nose from behind and threaten to rip the nose off your face. He hadn’t done these things yet, and neither had Maggie, but she was always looking for a chance. When

The problem with deep thinking was it could lead to unpleasant conclusions.

cart-road

onions in a bag. She

kept glancing uneasily

onions

He was sitting on a log; he sniffed the air and

At the beginning of the twelfth century, the rabbit was introduced to England.

sees them trapped and they are rescued by Benjamin’s

I promised only that you would see some sign of unicorns, and so you have. Your realm is blessed beyond any land’s deserving because they have passed across it in freedom. As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn’t say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits. Think of that, and be still.

Now there was silence. For hours on end the valley would be completely still and empty, and we became curious. What was everybody doing? Faustin, we knew, traveled around the neighboring farms as a visiting slaughterer, slitting the throats and breaking the necks of rabbits and ducks and pigs and geese so that they could be turned into terrines and hams and confits.

We might treat a rabbit as a pet or become emotionally attached to a goose, but we had come from cities and supermarkets, where flesh was hygienically distanced from any resemblance to living creatures. A shrink-wrapped pork chop has a sanitized, abstract appearance that has nothing whatever to do with the warm, mucky bulk of a pig. Out here in the country there was no avoiding the direct link between death and dinner.

As the water slips through my fingers, I think about just how much of my father is written into my DNA. I see him in the mirror every day—but it’s what we share on the inside that casts the longest shadow over me. Every time my anger opens up, every time I feel it speeding through my veins, hear it thundering in my ears, it’s one more reminder of Peter Covington. His influence works on me, unseen, like the moon pulling at the tides;

We thought it an uncharacteristic occupation for a softhearted man who spoiled his dogs, but he was evidently skilled and quick and, like any true countryman, he wasn’t distracted by sentiment. We might treat a rabbit as a pet or become emotionally attached to a goose, but we had come from cities and supermarkets, where flesh was hygienically distanced from any resemblance to living creatures. A shrink-wrapped pork chop has a sanitized, abstract appearance that has nothing whatever to do with the warm, mucky bulk of a pig.

The Drunken Fisherman" Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye (Truly Jehovah's bow suspends No pots of gold to weight its ends); Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout Rose to my bait. They flopped about My canvas creel until the moth Corrupted its unstable cloth. A calendar to tell the day; A handkerchief to wave away The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm Pouching a bottle in one arm; A whiskey bottle full of worms; And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms To mete the worm whose molten rage Boils in the belly of old age? Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot, Let suns stay in or suns step out: Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout-- The fisher's fluent and obscene Catches kept his conscience clean. Children, the raging memory drools Over the glory of past pools. Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls Its bloody waters into holes; A grain of sand inside my shoe Mimics the moon that might undo Man and Creation too; remorse, Stinking, has puddled up its source; Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage. This is the pot-hole of old age. Is there no way to cast my hook Out of this dynamited brook? The Fisher's sons must cast about When shallow waters peter out. I will catch Christ with a greased worm, And when the Prince of Darkness stalks My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . . On water the Man-Fisher walks.

Boys and girls are only little men and women. And WE are much harder and hardier than they are--" (Peter liked the "we." Perhaps the Doctor had known he would.)--"and much stronger, and things that hurt THEM don't hurt US. You know you mustn't hit a girl--" "I should think not, indeed," muttered Peter, indignantly. "Not even if she's your own sister. That's because girls are so much softer and weaker than we are; they have to be, you know," he added, "because if they weren't, it wouldn't be nice for the babies. And that's why all the animals are so good to the mother animals. They never fight them, you know." "I know," said Peter, interested; "two buck rabbits will fight all day if you let them, but they won't hurt a doe." "No; and quite wild beasts--lions and elephants--they're immensely gentle with the female beasts. And we've got to be, too." "I see," said Peter. "And their hearts are soft, too," the Doctor went on, "and things that we shouldn't think anything of hurt them dreadfully. So that a man has to be very careful, not only of his fists, but of his words. They're awfully brave, you know," he went on. "Think of Bobbie waiting alone in the tunnel with that poor chap. It's an odd thing- -the softer and more easily hurt a woman is the better she can screw herself up to do what HAS to be done. I've seen some brave women-- your Mother's one," he ended abruptly. "Yes," said Peter. "Well, that's all. Excuse my mentioning it. But nobody knows everything without being told. And you see what I mean, don't you?

I hope you don’t mind that we’re crashing,” Wes says. “I’m trying to escape a hunting expedition. No joke. Dad thinks I’ll be more of a man if I can blow a rabbit’s head off. And my response? ‘Sorry, Dad, but as tempting as it is to obliterate Peter Cottontail first thing on a Sunday morning, I promised Camelia I’d swing by her house, because she’s been begging to abuse my body for weeks.’” “And speaking of being delusional,” Kimmie segues, “did I mention that my plan to reunite my parents was totally dumb?” She leads us into my bedroom and then closes the door behind her. “They could smell the setup before their water glasses were even filled.” “How’s that?” I ask, taking a seat on my bed. “The violinist I arranged to serenade them at the table might have been a tip-off,” she begins. “Either that, or the wrist corsage I ordered for my mom. I handpicked the begonias and had the florist deliver it right to the table.” “Don’t forget about the oyster appetizer you preordered for the occasion,” Wes adds. “Because, you know what they say about oysters, right?” An evil grin breaks out across her face. ‘I know, I know.” She sighs, before I can even say anything. “I may have gone a little overboard, but what can I say? I’m a dorkus extremus. Hence my outit du jour.” She’s wearing a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform, a pair of clunky black glasses (with the requisite amount of tape on the bridge), and a cone-shaped dunce cap. “Yes, but you’re a dorkus extremus with a nice set of begonias,” Wes teases.

Another former chess player shared his own fond memory of Thiel from this era. Around the spring of 1988, the team was driving to Monterey for a tournament, with Thiel behind the wheel of the Rabbit. They took California’s Route 17, a four-lane highway that crosses the Santa Cruz Mountains and is regarded as one of the state’s most dangerous. The team was in no particular hurry, but Thiel drove as if he were a man possessed. He navigated the turns like Michael Andretti, weaving in and out of lanes, nearly rear-ending cars as he slipped past them, and seemed to be flooring the accelerator for large portions of the trip. Somewhat predictably, the lights of a California Highway Patrol cruiser eventually appeared in his rearview. Thiel was pulled over, and the trooper asked if he knew how fast he was going. The young men in the rest of the car, simultaneously relieved to have been stopped and scared of the trooper, looked at each other nervously. “Well,” Thiel responded, in his calmest, most measured baritone. “I’m not sure if the concept of a speed limit makes sense.” The officer said nothing. Thiel continued: “It may be unconstitutional. And it’s definitely an infringement on liberty.” The officer looked at Thiel and the geeks in the beater car and decided the whole thing wasn’t worth his time. He told Thiel to slow down and have a nice day. “I don’t remember any of the games we played,” said the man, now in his fifties, who’d been in the passenger seat. “But I will never forget that drive.

What will you do once you have the key?” Mia asks. “We’ll be able to break into every bank in the world!” Captain Dread declares proudly. “We can open every lock, everywhere!” “Um,” Harley says. “Banks don’t have keys anymore. They have codes, and scanners, and swipe passes. A key isn’t going to help you break into a bank.” The pirates all stop looking for the key and look at each other, confused. “We’ll just use it for anything with a key then!” “Like what?” I ask. “Like… the candy store.” “They use a swipe code for their locks.” “Hotels?” “Swipe cards.” “Government buildings?” “Codes.” “Food shops?” “Scanners.” “Safes?” “Dial codes.” “Cars?” “Keyless.” “Houses?” “Um…” I think about that for a moment. “Yep, I think most houses still use keys. You could use it there.” “Then we will break into every house in the world!” Captain Dread declares again. “We will enter any house we want to, at any time. With the possession of the Skeleton Key, we will be unstoppable! We will be the unstoppable pirates!” “Captain Wed, if you go into my house,” I say. “Can you check that my pet bunny rabbit has enough food? I am not sure if I gave him enough food before I left.” “No! I will steal things from your house; not feed your bunny rabbit!” “We can’t let him have that key, Charlie,” Harley whispers to me. “He will have too much power. We will have to keep the key a secret from him.” “Captain Zed, you are not going to steal anything from me. You can get off this boat now,” I say, as I pick up my backpack full of Super Spy gadgets.

Rabbit!

The Value of a Spouse At age 26, Walt Disney was already the head of a successful cartoon studio in Hollywood, California. But business was less than rosy for the young cartoonist, because his principal property, Oswald the Rabbit, had just been wrested from his control by his financial backers. "Mrs. Disney and I were coming back from New York on the train and I had to have something I could tell them," He recalled. "I have lost Oswald, but I had this mouse in the back of my head..." Walt’s new creation was a little mouse in red velvet pants named "Mortimer." 'Walt's wife, Lillian, felt that was too pompous a name for such a cute character and suggested "Mickey'' instead.

few

cemeteries

god

thumb

The good Claus must have been here, my darlings; for his are the only toys in all the world!

Did you read the Peter Rabbit books when you were young?” I asked. “That’s what this place reminds me of--the Rabbits’ burrow.” “I’m glad.” He began to smile. I realized it was the first time I had ever seen him smile. “You look different when you smile,” I said softly. His eyes caught mine, resting on them for a moment before looking down at my bloody hands. “Come here.” He gestured for me to sit on the carpet in front of the fireplace. “This is going to sting, but it’s the only way to clean out those cuts.” He poured salt into the now-hot water and crouched down behind me, reaching around to circle my wrists and lower my hands slowly into the pot. I gasped at the shock. I closed my eyes and tried to shut out the pain. As the clear water reddened with blood and the bits of glass and metal loosened from my skin, I began to feel acutely aware of Wesley, still kneeling there behind me, his breath tickling my ear. He stood up abruptly. “Stay here. I’m going to see if I can find us anything to eat.

Only Peter Rabbit didn’t get any. Don’t you remember?” said Grandfather. “He will this time,” said Joe. “At last Peter Rabbit has his blackberries and cream, on his birthday.

I’m a freaking bunny? A bunny. I’m Peter fucking Rabbit.

Flats?

Another little rule (for medical scientists especially) is that mice, rats, and other laboratory animals should never be injected. Few hypodermic needles are large enough for even the smallest mouse to pass through, especially if it is injected with something. ("Mice were injected wiht rabbit serum albumin mixed with Freund's adjuvant," we read. "Ah, but what into?" the cry goes up.)

Fibonacci is best known for a short passage in Liber Abaci that led to something of a mathematical miracle. The passage concerns the problem of how many rabbits will be born in the course of a year from an original pair of rabbits, assuming that every month each pair produces another pair and that rabbits begin to breed when they are two months old. Fibonacci discovered that the original pair of rabbits would have spawned a total of 233 pairs of offspring in the course of a year. He discovered something else, much more interesting. He had assumed that the original pair would not breed until the second month and then would produce another pair every month. By the fourth month, their first two offspring would begin breeding. After the process got started, the total number of pairs of rabbits at the end of each month would be as follows: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233. Each successive number is-the sum of the two preceding numbers. If the rabbits kept going for a hundred months, the total number pairs would be 354,224,848,179,261,915,075. The Fibonacci series is a lot more than a source of amusement. Divide any of the Fibonacci numbers by the next higher number. After 3, the answer is always 0.625. After 89, the answer is always 0.618; after higher numbers, more decimal places can be filled in.a Divide any number by its preceding number. After 2, the answer is always 1.6. After 144, the answer is always 1.618. The Greeks knew this proportion and called it “the golden mean.” The golden mean defines the proportions of the Parthenon, the shape of playing cards and credit cards, and the proportions of the General Assembly Building at the United Nations in New York. The horizontal member of most Christian crosses separates the vertical member by just about the same ratio: the length above the crosspiece is 61.8% of the length below it. The golden mean also appears throughout nature—in flower patterns, the leaves of an artichoke, and the leaf stubs on a palm tree. It is also the ratio of the length of the human body above the navel to its length below the navel (in normally proportioned people, that is). The length of each successive bone in our fingers, from tip to hand, also bears this ratio.b

I’m old-fashioned. Where I come from, people like to succeed. . . . When I was a founder, when I first started out, we didn’t have the word ‘pivot.’ We didn’t have a fancy word for it. We just called it a fuck-up. “We do see companies that, literally, every time we meet them, they’ve pivoted. Every time, they’re off to something new, and it’s like watching a rabbit go through a maze or something. They’re never going to converge on anything because they’re never going to put the time into actually figuring it out and getting it right.” (See Peter Thiel’s thoughts on failure on page 233.)

Many distractions have an addictive quality—junk food, gaming, endless internet rabbit holes to fall into—but we can’t get sucked in if we never allow ourselves to get too close to the vortex!

Don’t fall down the rabbit hole of researching obsessively on Google or comparing thousands of brands to find the best one.

The problem he recognized was that much of the basic research into cholesterol and atherosclerosis had been conducted in rabbits, which have a unique ability to absorb cholesterol into their blood from their food and form atherosclerotic plaques from it; the mistake was to assume that humans also absorb dietary cholesterol as readily. “There’s no connection whatsoever between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in blood,

You’re born cute. Babies are cute. Not hard to guess why – it’s so everyone will forgive them for being such a pain. You grow a little older, and people say, what beautiful hair, or get a load of those baby blues,’ or something nice that keeps you thinking you’re still on the cuteness track. Then you hit twelve or thirteen and boom, they tell you everything needs fixing.

Sometimes fear helps, he said. Like fear of flunking a test, so you study. But when bad’s going to happen for sure, fear only hurts.

The power of suggestion. Maybe everything human ended up being subjective and nothing could be known for sure.

Guilt was dread without the tightness in the chest part, just the weight in the gut.

Being rich, really rich, meant you could go completely crazy, and the only result would be everyone getting so jealous they couldn’t stand it.

At that moment, Ingrid remembered ‘The Five Orange Pips’ and maybe the most important thing Holmes told Watson: the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the ones, both before and after.

Children interested Miss Peters, especially when she found one that had not been run into a mold or cut out of a given piece of cloth and made up like a flannel rabbit.

In the middle of the night, Annastasia, her brother Cornelius and their dog Blackie are woken by the arrival of an unexpected and most unusual visitor, Tiny Tinsel Tinker the Third. With the help of his drawstring bag, Purple, Tinsel delights our trio with all sorts of surprises, not the least of which are his delicious, invisible cookies and his Helli Umbrella. In this the first of Tinsel’s stories, he tells the sad tale of how he and his family became separated in a terrible storm, how he rescued Blue Rabbit and his quest to find his family.

But it was his speaking voice that would be famous, first on The Children’s Hour, later as announcer on the Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts. The show was heavily musical, following Cross’s deep interest in classical music and opera. There might be an opening hymn, sung by Audrey Egan; then a poem; then a song from one of the youngest children. “And who is standing here with her ticket ready to pay for a ride on the White Rabbit Bus?” Cross would ask; and a small voice would chirp, “It’s Jeannie Elkins, Mr. Conductor.” Then came another song, and the members of the Peter Pig Club would clamor for a story, which Cross would narrate and the cast act out. Among the notables to emerge from the show were Metropolitan Opera star Rise Stevens and screen actress Ann Blyth. Vivian Smolen, Jackie Kelk, Walter Tetley, and the Halops had distinguished radio careers as adults.

Then there is The Whole Rat Catalog. Published by Harvard Bioscience, it consists of 140 pages of equipment for use in experimenting on small animals, all written in cute advertising jargon. Of the transparent plastic rabbit restrainers, for instance, the catalog tells us: “The only thing that wiggles is the nose!” Sometimes, however, a little sensitivity to the controversial nature of the subject is shown: the description of the Rodent Carrying Case suggests, “Use this unobtrusive case to carry your favorite animal from one place to another without attracting attention.” In addition to the usual cages, electrodes, surgical implements, and syringes, the catalog advertises Rodent Restraint Cones, Harvard Swivel-Tether Systems, Radiation Resistant Gloves, Implantable FM Telemetry Equipment, Liquid Diets for Rats and Mice in Alcohol Studies, Decapitators for both small and large animals, and even a Rodent Emulsifier which “will quickly reduce the remains of a small animal to a homogenous suspension.”26

She asked her parents to buy him the books she’d been read by her first teachers, Peter Rabbit and Frog and Toad. “What’s the point of buying books for someone who can’t read?” her parents asked, legitimately enough, and so she checked them out of her school library and read them to Rahul herself.

Some books that were rejected multiple times, but are now famous, are J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Beatrice Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit