Oh, I do not like it! Not one little bit!

This line is spoken by the unnamed narrator in Dr. Seuss’s children’s book *Green Eggs and Ham*, during Sam-I-am’s relentless attempts to persuade him to try the titular dish. The book is structured as a rapid-fire sequence of refusals as Sam proposes increasingly absurd places and situations to eat the meal. The quote captures one of the narrator’s emphatic rejections early in the escalating back-and-forth, before the eventual turning point when he finally tastes the food and revises his opinion.

The couplet distills stubborn aversion into simple, rhythmic language that a beginning reader can easily follow and repeat. Its exaggerated insistence (“Not one little bit!”) dramatizes how people often reject unfamiliar experiences without evidence, relying on certainty that is more emotional than rational. In the larger arc of *Green Eggs and Ham*, the line helps set up the moral experiment of the story: persistence and openness can overturn prejudice. The humor lies in the intensity of the refusal contrasted with the triviality of what’s being refused—just a bite of food.