Classic Peanuts Sally Brown Quote Endures After 63 Years

Charlie Brown is one of the most consistently unlucky characters in Western fiction. The degree to which life and the universe contort to dump misfortune directly on his head is the beating heart at the core of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. If you face any problems, you can read about Charlie Brown and feel slightly cheered by the knowledge that at least your situation is better than his.

For nearly 50 years, despite taking more losses than a stuck typewriter, Charlie Brown almost never got mad about it. His style is world-weary acceptance, verging on Zen calm. Other characters usually do the raging, crying, and questioning. That task typically falls to Lucy or Linus, but Charlie’s little sister Sally Brown takes her own swings at the fundamental unfairness of childhood.

When modern fans talk about Peanuts, Sally’s best-remembered moments usually involve her innocent insults toward Charlie Brown or her deeply one-sided crush on Linus. On a reread, however, her antagonistic relationship with academia stands out just as much.

Conjugate your verbs

Sally is the patron saint of unwilling students in Peanuts. Most of the rest of the gang never seemed to mind their studies. Patty is not good at school, but she does not actively resent it the way Sally does. If you were one of the kids who tried to wriggle out from under the burden of public schooling, Sally was your representative in the crew.

That does not mean Sally opposes learning entirely. Sally is nearly as prone to suddenly busting out graduate-level biblical scholarship as Linus.

If you want to assemble a best-quotes lineup for Sally, a safe lock for the top spot is “Happiness is your own library card” from April 26, 1963. That line is ready-made for school walls and literacy drives, and it ranks as her most quotable line in the entire strip.

Rereading some of Sally’s greatest hits reveals another strip that offers a useful moral for the internet generation.

Come correct or not at all

Sally Brown is one of the all-time great poor students in the Western comics canon. Her attempts to escape schoolwork through bluffs, short cons, and turns of phrase are legendary, even if she is never as sharp as Calvin.

In the strip for June 11, 1978, Sally makes a mistake, but a decent moral accompanies it. When she starts a letter by writing “Deer,” Charlie Brown tries to correct her. Sally ignores him and continues the sentence to start what appears to be a term paper about deer.

As Sally yells at a rapidly retreating Charlie Brown, “It seems to me that a lot of the problems in this world are caused by people who criticize other people before they know what they’re talking about!”

Once Charlie Brown leaves, Sally restarts the letter and writes “Dear Grandma,” exactly as he suggested.

It is a fun joke, but it is also a useful reminder. In the age of social media, diving headlong into an incomplete conversation without knowing the full context is easy. Let Sally Brown serve as your guide. Make sure to lurk more before you post. This nearly 50-year-old strip doubles as a solid way to avoid mistakes online.

Source: Polygon