For I do not believe God means us thus to divide life into half halves - to wear a grave face on Sunday, and to think it out-of-place to even so much as mention Him on a weekday. Do you think he cares to see only kneeling figures, and to hear only tones of prayer - and that He does not also love to see the lambs leaping in the sunlight, and to hear the merry voices of the children as they roll among the hay? Surely their innocent laughter is as sweet in His ears as the grandest anthem that ever rolled up from the 'dim religious light' of some solemn cathedral?

— Lewis Carroll

From an essay on early reading by Robert Minsky:My favorite reading for many years was the "Alice" books. The sentences had the same somber, drugged conviction as Sir John Tennis's illustrations, an inexplicable, shadowy dignity that reminded me of the portraits and symbols engraved on paper money. The books were not made of words and sentences but of that smoky assurance, the insistent solidity of folded, textured, Victorian interiors elaborately barricaded against the doubt and ennui of a dreadfully Godforsaken vision. The drama of resisting some corrosive, enervating loss, some menacing boredom, made itself clear in the matter-of-fact reality of the story. Behind the drawings I felt not merely a tissue of words and sentences but an unquestioned, definite reality. I read the books over and over. Inevitably, at some point, I began trying to see how it was done, to unravel the making--to read the words as words, to peek behind the reality. The loss entailed by such knowledge is immense. Is the romance of "being a writer"--a romance perhaps even created to compensate for this catastrophic loss--worth the price? The process can be epitomized by the episode that goes with one of my favorite illustrations. Alice has entered a dark wood--"much darker than the last wood":[S]he reached the wood: It looked very cool and shady. "Well, at any rate it's a great comfort," she said as she stepped under the trees, "after being so hot, to get into the--into what?" she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. "I mean to get under the--under this, you know!" putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. "What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name--why to be sure it hasn't!" This is the wood where things have no names, which Alice has been warned about. As she tries to remember her own name ("I know it begins with L!"), a Fawn comes wandering by. In its soft, sweet voice, the Fawn asks Alice, "What do you call yourself?" Alice returns the question, the creature replies, "I'll tell you, if you'll come a little further on. . . . I can't remember here". The Tennis picture that I still find affecting illustrates the first part of the next sentence: So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm. "I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight. "And dear me! You're a human child!" A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed. In the illustration, the little girl and the animal walk together with a slightly awkward intimacy, Alice's right arm circled over the Fawn's neck and back so that the fingers of her two hands meet in front of her waist, barely close enough to mesh a little, a space between the thumbs. They both look forward, and the affecting clumsiness of the pose suggests that they are tripping one another. The great-eyed Fawn's legs are breathtakingly thin. Alice's expression is calm, a little melancholy or spaced-out. What an allegory of the fall into language. To imagine a child crossing over from the jubilant, passive experience of such a passage in its physical reality, over into the phrase-by-phrase, conscious analysis of how it is done--all that movement and reversal and feeling and texture in a handful of sentences--is somewhat like imagining a parallel masking of life itself, as if I were to discover, on reflection, that this room where I am writing, the keyboard, the jar of pens, the lamp, the rain outside, were all made out of words. From "Some Notes on Reading," in The Most Wonderful Books (Milkweed Editions)

— Robert Pinsky

Have I..." I venture, terrified of the potential answer. "Have I gone mad?" "No, no, no." She says. "Okay, OUI, put-être, that depends. Maybe you have gone a little mad, and only for a little spell.

— M.D. Elster

He lifted his shirt, and on his back was the White Rabbit, wearing his waistcoat and looking at his watch. It was just like the illustration from the book. Only standing next to him, back-to-back, was another White Rabbit wearing a leather motorcycle jacket and boots and smoking a cigar.

— Michael Thomas Ford

How long is forever? Sometimes just one second

— Lewis Carroll

I always thought they were fabulous monsters!" said the Unicorn. "Is it alive?"" It can talk," said Haifa, solemnly. The Unicorn looked dreamily at Alice, and said, "Talk, child." Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: "Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too! I never saw one alive before!"" Well, now that we have seen each other," said the Unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?

— Lewis Carroll

I am here because I have to be here, as here I am supposed to be! All things should be, and usually are, found in their rightful places. Can you imagine how chaotic the world would be if nothing was in its correct place?

— William O'Brien

If all the people break, and all the world breaks, and everyone and everything goes mad, then I can be normal, just like everyone else, right?

— Jun Mochizuki

I feel like Alice in Wonderland. Maybe Lewis G Carroll was on drugs too.

— Beatrice Sparks

I fell into the water with a large splash and sunk like a stone. My feet guided the way as I drifted further into the murky depths. Down. Down. Down.

— Brynn Myers