The Mice Sneezed!

But no sooner had he finished speaking than all the Mice turned round at once, and sneezed at him in an appalling and vindictive manner, (and it is impossible to imagine a more scroobious and unpleasant sound than that caused by the simultaneous sneezing of many millions of angry Mice)...

-Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, 98.

Sneezes

Not long ago, I walked out the door of my house on a clear, cold morning and was thinking pure business when, halfway across the porch, I felt that familiar pleasant wave in the chest—the magnetic field of the sneeze—and the long intake of breath and the pulsation in the head. I wound up, reared back, and delivered a sneeze worthy of Pavarotti—a six-syllable sneeze that sounded like "onomatopoeia!" On the accented syllable I stamped my foot (wham!) on the wooden floor, and then the majestic cry (and wham!) came bouncing back to me off the house across the street. I thought, God bless you! I said good morning to the bunch of children who wait for their schoolbus on my corner. They appeared to be awestruck. I climbed into my car and drove off, and at the corner the stoplight turned a luminous green.

-Garrison Keillor, We Are Still Married, 163-164.

The Duchess' Song

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes;
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.

CHORUS:
Wow! wow! wow!

I speak severely to my boy,
I beat him when he sneezes;
For he can thoroughly enjoy
The pepper when he pleases!

-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Sneezes

“It does remind me of the time I sneezed a gold tooth out of my head on Penalty Street down at Bangor,” said Captain Broad.

“Did you?” said Captain Huffle, though perchance he had heard the story before.

“Sneezes often come in threes, you know,” said Captain Broad, “and there were some who gathered about to see what I would produce next.”

-Van Reid, Mrs Roberto

Winn-Dixie

“Come on, Winn-Dixie,” I said to the dog.

I started walking and he followed along behind me as I went out of the produce department and down the cereal aisle and past all the cashiers and out the door.

Once we were safe outside, I checked him over real careful and he didn’t look that good. He was big, but skinny: you could see his ribs. And there were bald patches all over him, places where he didn’t have any fur at all. Mostly, he looked like a big piece of old brown carpet that had been left out in the rain.

“You’re a mess,” I told him. “I bet you don’t belong to anybody.”

He smiled at me. He did that thing again, where he pulled back his lips and showed me his teeth. He smiled so big that it made him sneeze. It was like he was saying, “I know I’m a mess. Isn’t it funny?”

It’s hard not to immediately fall in love with a dog who has a good sense of humor.

“Come on,” I told him. “Let’s see what the preacher has to say about you.”

And the two of us, me and Winn-Dixie, started walking home.

-Katie DiCamillo, Because of Winn-Dixie