I am on day 1 hour 1 of teaching myself Scheme. Needless to say, I don\'t understand anything. So I\'m reading The Little Schemer and using this thing:
I suggest that you move to a better environment like PLT Scheme, which has an IDE, debugger and lots of libraries. As you move forward and start writing larger programs, you will need them.
The single-quote character is syntactic sugar for the "quote" expression, so 'turkey is the same as (quote turkey). Basically, what "quote" does is to switch off the Scheme evaluator. In other words, "quote" returns the expression, verbatim. If there was no "quote", then Scheme would try to evaluate "turkey" in the current environment. This is not a Common Lisp thing but a Lisp thing. Common Lisp and Scheme are two dialects of Lisp. The uses of "quote" are explained in all Lisp tutorials/books. Also see the answers to this question.