Scripture Study at Faulkner's House

I read an interview with William Faulkner in The Paris Review this morning, and loved his response to the question of how he learned The Bible.  It reminded me of my own childhood, each kid in the family having to read a verse of scripture before dinner.  Faulkner seems to capture the restlessness of that part of childhood--that, and much more:

"My Great-Grandfather Murry was a kind and gentle man, to
us children anyway. ... he was simply a man of
inflexible principles. One of them was everybody, children on up
through all adults present, had to have a verse from the Bible ready
and glib at tongue-tip when we gathered at the table for breakfast
each morning; if you didn’t have your scripture verse ready, you
didn’t have any breakfast; you would be excused long enough
to leave the room and swot one up (there was a maiden aunt, a
kind of sergeant-major for this duty, who retired with the culprit
and gave him a brisk breezing which carried him over the jump
next time).

It had to be an authentic, correct verse. While we were little, it
could be the same one, once you had it down good, morning after
morning, until you got a little older and bigger, when one morning
(by this time you would be pretty glib at it, galloping through
without even listening to yourself since you were already five or ten
minutes ahead, already among the ham and steak and fried chicken
and grits and sweet potatoes and two or three kinds of hot bread)
you would suddenly find his eyes on you—very blue, very kind
and gentle, and even now not stern so much as inflexible—and
next morning you had a new verse. In a way, that was when you
discovered that your childhood was over; you had outgrown it and
entered the world."