Star Spangled Banner Quotes

“Why don’t you turn on the dawnzer?” Ramona asked, proud of her new word.

Beezus looked up from her book. “What are you talking about?” she asked Ramona.

“What’s a dawnzer?”

Ramona was scornful. “Silly. Everybody knows what a dawnzer is.”

“I don’t,” said Mr. Quimby, who had been reading the evening paper. “What is a dawnzer?”

“A lamp,” said Ramona. “It gives a lee light. We sing about it every morning in kindergarten.”

A puzzled silence fell over the room until Beezus suddenly shouted with laughter.

“She-she means—” she gasped, “The Star-Spangled B-banner!” Her laughter dwindled to giggles. “She means the dawn’s early light.”
― Beverly Cleary, Ramona the Pest

“Nobody's truly free. Everyone is prisoner to a secret, a sin, a lie. It wasn't by accident that, in the Star Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could attain it.”
― J. Matthew Nespoli

“I wondered how many people had sung "By the dawn's early light' yesterday and were dead today.”
― Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life As We Knew It

“Happy belated 4th of July to the Americans July 2, 1776, was meant for. Not the American's; some of whom's ancestors fought for the British against a nation that DIDN'T then, COULDN'T after The Emancipation Proclamation, and still CAN'T seem to recognize our basic human rights.”
― A.K. Kuykendall