G: I spent some time digging for this, and unfortunately I didn't find an exact match for those lines. I tried searching for the complete quotation, partial quotations, and likely variants in digitized children's books, primers, nursery rhymes, and early readers. The exact wording doesn't appear in any of the large searchable collections I checked. citeturn0search2turn1search0

The fact that the lines rhyme so neatly—

"Let us go," said the crow.
"Let us not," said the cat.

—makes me suspect one of a few possibilities:

A very short reader or phonics book. Early reading books from roughly the 1930s–1970s often had repetitive rhyming dialogue exactly like this, and many were never OCR'd well enough to be searchable.
A school anthology. It may have been a single page or poem inside a basal reader rather than a standalone children's book.
A slight memory shift. Sometimes one remembered word ("crow" or "cat") differs from the printed version ("rook," "hen," "rat,"

2026-08-01 13:45:46 EDT

M: Cot, not cat.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Ah! "cot" instead of "cat" changes things substantially. "Cot" is unusual enough that it's much less likely my search would accidentally match unrelated nursery rhymes.

I reran the search using cot specifically, including exact-phrase searches and variants. Unfortunately, I still didn't find an exact hit. That's actually informative: it suggests this probably isn't from a widely digitized or OCR-indexed book. If it were, a phrase as distinctive as

"Let us go," said the crow.
"Let us not," said the cot.

would almost certainly surface.

A couple of thoughts:

The use of "cot" as a speaking character is itself unusual. In older children's literature (especially from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s), inanimate objects were often characters, so it doesn't strike me as impossible—just uncommon.
If those are the exact lines, I'd now lean even more toward a school reader, phonics book, or anthology rather than a famous picture book. Those often had one- or two-page stories that were never independently indexed. The web search turned up many books with "said the crow" dialogue, but none with the distinctive "said the cot." citeturn1search12

Can I ask a few memory-jogging questions? Even one answer might narrow it dramatically:

About what year would you have read it? (1980s? Early '90s? Earlier because it was an old library book?)
Was it a standalone picture book, or was it in a school reading textbook?
Do you remember whether the cot actually moved or talked, or was the humor that an ordinary cot was refusing to go somewhere?
Were there other rhyming pairs (crow/go, cot/not, etc.), or are those the only lines you remember?

This is exactly the kind of thing that sometimes turns up in obscure scanned readers or library catalogs once there's one more clue. I'm happy to keep digging—this has become an interesting little literary archaeology problem.

2026-08-01 13:46:25 EDT

M: This would have been 1980s, probably the early half.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: That helps narrow it quite a bit.

If you were reading it in the early 1980s, the book itself could easily have been anywhere from the 1950s through the early 1980s, since elementary school libraries and classrooms tended to keep books for decades.

I also think your correction to "cot" makes it less likely that we're dealing with a famous children's book. It's such an odd pairing that I'd expect it to be searchable if it came from something like Dr. Seuss, P.D. Eastman, Arnold Lobel, etc.

At this point, my leading hypotheses are:

An I Can Read / phonics reader with very short, repetitive rhyming sentences.
A Ginn, Scott Foresman, Houghton Mifflin, or Open Court basal reader (the books used in elementary school reading classes).
A British beginning reader. "Cot" is a much more natural everyday word in British English than in American English, so a British import or adaptation would make more sense than an American original.

One thing I haven't exhausted is the Internet Archive's scans of old school readers. Their OCR is often poor, so exact phrase searches can miss things even when the text is present. That means this is one of those rare cases where a manual trawl through likely readers could succeed where search fails.

I think this is still findable, but it's probably going to require detective work rather than a simple web search.

One question that could dramatically narrow the field:

Was this a book you owned at home, or one you read at school or in the library?

Also, do you remember anything else about the page? Even something as vague as:

Was the crow flying or standing?
Was the cot drawn with a face, or was it just an ordinary bed?
Was the art more like simple line drawings or full-color paintings?

Those tiny visual details can sometimes identify a publisher or series.

And I'll admit, now I'm curious myself. "Let us go, said the crow. Let us not, said the cot." is exactly the kind of line that lodges in a child's memory for forty years. If we can pin down one more clue, I think there's a decent chance of tracking the source down.