Who said how lucky i am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard

A request from a reader!  How could I resist. 
"How about the quote 'how lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.' I assumed it was in the final chapter when Christopher Robin goes to school but it is not there... It is all over the Internet. Have you come across it? - Helen"

I definitely agree that this quote is most frequently attributed to Pooh in general, if not to Milne specifically. Above is one example of this quote from the intertubes, presented using crappy-typewriter font to make the text look more authentic.  However, this attribution is completely wrong.  This quote does not turn up in any Milne text at all; neither does it turn up in any Disney movies involving Pooh and chums.  I've also seen this quote attributed to the movie "Annie!", which is also completely wrong.

The origin of this quote is in fact a 1975 movie called "The Other Side of the Mountain" about Jill Kinmont, whose chance at competing in the 1956 Winter Olympics is scuppered when she is paralyzed during a skiing accident.  Apparently her best friend also gets polio, then she meets some guy, falls in love, then he dies tragically. (Plane crash? House fire? Who cares.).  Lots of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps is involved. Exactly the sort of thing that the recently departed Stella Young would scoffingly refer to as inspiration porn. 
If you wanna hear the full quote in situ, check out this clip from the last minutes of the film "The Other Side of the Mountain".  Full quote: "I remember the words that Dick Buek said to me the last time I saw him: How lucky I am to have known someone and something that saying goodbye is so damned awful."  

Opportunities for being a insufferable know-it-all by pointing out that, erm actually, that isn't a Milne quote, are somewhat limited however as most often this quote appears to crop up in reference to bereavements. Not generally a good time to correct people's use of source material.

Professor Kapow

1/26/2016 12:59:07 pm

You are very funny.

Vernon

2/9/2016 01:15:25 pm

Oh my God! I laughed so hard at the last picture! Still, thanks for the information. You are very helpful

PoohMisquoted

2/9/2016 01:57:52 pm

You are my new best friend.

Pooh fan

7/13/2016 03:15:22 pm

I love this, totally saved my ass on posting an innacurate quote lol so do you have any suggestions that might be similar to the idea of this phrase?

The very start of Milne's "The House at Pooh Corner" (1928) begins with a Contradiction. (Because the characters have already been introduced in the first book, something the opposite of an introduction was apparently needed in this second book. 'Contradiction' was Owl's suggestion). This Contradiction explains that the entire book is a 'good-bye' of sorts. The last line reads: "But, of course, it isn't really Good-bye, because the Forest will always be there... and anybody who is Friendly with Bears can find it." I'm not that helps, but that's the way of the original Milne books: things are really fairly straightforward and not very deep. Which is the delightful thing about them.

Jason

12/7/2016 03:08:06 pm

Good. So I'm not nuts! I couldn't find many of the quotes in the books, so I downloaded PDF's and searched them and found almost none of the famous quotes. I was so confused. Thanks for the answers, I just wish I was smart enough to Google my confusion an hour ago.

Seriously people, in 2016 there's no excuse to have full webpages and products full of completely wrong, easily verifiable quotes. Maybe some famous people who said this or that in a speech might be misquoted, but not something from a reasonably short, written book which anybody has access to.

FYI, I couldn't disagree with your response to Pooh Fan when you said the books are "really fairly straightforward and not very deep". I think they're incredibly deep. Take: "...when you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it". That basically sums up a really complicated experience like adolescence in one, simple sentence anybody can understand. The ability to sum up very complicated things in a single sentence with words a 6 yr old knows is astoundingly deep to me. I can't stand how most people try to come off as smart by sounding like a thesaurus exploding all over a psyche degree. A 6 yr old will understand the sentence, but an adult can figure out why Thingish is capitalized, which takes it to a whole 'nother level (i.e. deep). That makes it a collection that gets deeper the more you peel back the layers. It's straightforward, yet NOT straightforward. Just sayin.

I think it's not a Pooh quote at all. Someone stuck it on a cutsie placard with Pooh characters and it went viral. I also looked up another Pooh quote which actually came from a completely different source: Piglet: 'How do you spell love?' Pooh: 'You don't spell it, you feel it.'

Nadine Kelly

6/1/2020 08:24:36 pm

I saw “other side of the mountain” in the theatre, when I was a tween. Yup I’m that old. A young Beau Bridges okayed Dick Buik and he was a real person and a talented skier. He died in a plane crash in a plane he was flying. I remember this quote so well. I wrote it down after the movie.

"A young Beau Bridges okayed Dick Buik"

Played him in the movie, too.
A real double-threat, that Beau Bridges was, back in the day.
Srsly, I want to thank ALL of you for affirming that this is yet another of those ubiquitous internet misattributions.
I knew the Pooh books almost by heart when I was a li'l tater-tot myself, and was so sure I'd never seen this line anywhere in any of them.
Plus, also, too, it just doesn't FEEL like a Milne phrasing.
So I thank you all again, so very much, for setting the record straight with the real source.

Cindy

7/14/2020 05:58:58 am

Hi Nadine! Me too! I loved this movie and have never forgotten that quote!

Shelley Gagnon Welch

11/28/2020 07:14:04 am

While a good portion of your post is funny, I wanted to point out that you making light of how a person dies is extremely offensive. If you did your homework, the movie "The Other Side of the Mountain" was about a real person. Your comment on the death of Dick Buick, a US National Downhill skier, was inappropriate ie "plane crash, house fire who cares". He had a family. FYI he died in a plane crash at the age of 27.

Badger

12/15/2020 01:03:32 am

Wow, you must be fun at parties!

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