Through The Looking Glass Quotes

“all people start to
come apart finally
and there it is:
just empty ashtrays in a room
or wisps of hair on a comb
in the dissolving moonlight.”
― Charles Bukowski

“He's dreaming now,' said Tweedledee: 'and what do you think he's dreaming about?'
Alice said 'Nobody can guess that.'
'Why, about YOU!' Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. 'And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?'
'Where I am now, of course,' said Alice.
'Not you!' Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. 'You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!'
'If that there King was to wake,' added Tweedledum, 'you'd go out—bang!—just like a candle!”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

“It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they always purr: "If they would only purr for 'yes,' and mew for 'no,; or any rule of that sort," she had said, "so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“The bar to become and remain relevant is higher than ever. You need to run that much faster to stay in the same place, or even likely end up behind.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“On Christmas. "Santa Claus represents God on assistance," said Clyde.

"Santa Claus is a negative-idealed god, the pagan god of material worship," Leon stated. "Christmas means the rebirth, regeneration. Some people have Christmas every day. The Christmas tree stands up and either the wife trims it or they trim it together with righteous-idealed sexual intercourse. Or the husband prays to God through his Christmas tree and trims his bodily Christmas tree. Christ-mast; the mast of Christ, the upstanding penis—that's what it means to me."

"Santa Claus is a good symbolization for Christmas," said Joseph. "Department stores, shopping, the coming of the New Year. Christmas means better business in the stores.”
― Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti: A Psychological Study

“Well, in OUR country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’

‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

“I suppose you don’t want to lose your name?’

‘No, indeed,’ Alice said, a little anxiously.

‘And yet I don’t know,’ the Gnat went on in a careless tone: ‘only think how convenient it would be if you could manage to go home without it! For instance, if the governess wanted to call you to your lessons, she would call out “come here—,” and there she would have to leave off, because there wouldn’t be any name for her to call, and of course you wouldn’t have to go, you know.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

“I looked into your eyes and was captivated by the chaos that ran through you. I wish you hadn't said all the things I wanted to hear!”
― Ahmed Mostafa

“As children', wrote Alice Raikes (Mrs. Wilson Fox) in The Times, January 22, 1932, 'we lived in Onslow Square and used to play in the garden behind the houses. Charles Dodgson used to stay with an old uncle there, and walk up and down, his hands behind him, on the strip of lawn. One day, hearing my name, he called me to him saying, "So you are another Alice. I'm very found of Alices. Would you like to come and see something which is rather puzzling?" We followed him into his house which opened, as ours did, upon the garden, into a room full of furniture with a tall mirror standing across one corner.' "Now", he said giving me an orange, "first tell me which hand you have got that in." "The right" I said. "Now", he said, "go and stand before that glass, and tell me which hand the little girl you see there has got it in." After some perplexed contemplation, I said, "The left hand." "Exactly," he said, "and how do you explain that?" I couldn't explain it, but seeing that some solution was expected, I ventured, "If I was on the other side of the glass, wouldn't the orange still be in my right hand?" I can remember his laugh. "Well done, little Alice," he said. "The best answer I've heard yet." "I heard no more then, but in after years was told that he said that had given him his first idea for Through the Looking-Glass, a copy of which, together with each of his other books, he regularly sent me.”
― Lewis Carroll

“...It is only now that memory works both ways. Which of us dreamed it - those from the country of nights five times as warm and as cold, or those who turned away and woke?”
― Angele Ellis

“With the sensation that he was passing through the Looking-Glass, Max stared at his father as if he had never seen him before—simultaneously impressed and unnerved at the thought that, after all these years, he still knew so little about him.”
― Sol Luckman, Snooze: A Story of Awakening

“I'm sure the woods look sleepy in the autumn, when the leaves are getting brown.”
― Lewis Carroll

“In Winter, when the fields are white, I sing this song for your delight. In Spring, when the woods are getting green, I’ll try and tell you what i mean. In Summer, when the days are long, perhaps you’ll understand the song. In Autumn, when the leaves are brown, take pen and ink, and write it down.”
― Lewis Carroll

“You can't go through the looking-glass without cutting yourself.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“I'll whisper it," said the Messenger, putting his hands to his mouth in the shape of a trumpet and stooping so as to get close to the King's ear. However, instead of whispering, he simply shouted at the top of his voice "They're at it again!"

"Do you call THAT a whisper?" cried the poor King, jumping up and shaking himself. "If you do such a thing again, I'll have you buttered! It went through and through my head like an earthquake!”
― Lewis Carroll, -Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass

“Alice falls into her own story all at the cost of seeking the answer to the Looking-glass question; (novel/stageplay/screenplay/audiobook)”
― Zizzi Bonah, Alice Returns Through The Looking-Glass

“He looked down at a red book, embossed in gold. The title was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. He frowned at it in confusion. It wasn't what he'd thought a mortal book would be like; he thought they would be dull things, odes to their cars or skyscrapers.
...
'This is really a mortal book?' he asked.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“Aren't you sometimes frightened? About being planted out here with nobody to take care of you?"
"Oh, there's the tree in the middle," said the rose "What else is it good for?"
"But what could it do if any danger came?", Alice asked.
"Oh it could bark", said the rose.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“There are many things I would like to believe in, because they would accord life coherence. One of them is God. Another is the notion that on the brink of death one’s life dances before one’s eyes in kaleidoscopic fragments: dramas, traumas, transcendent highs, troughs of gloom, or the crystallize moments that encapsulate a certain mood on a certain day, like - for me - the smell of forsythia blossom at nursery school, or a turn of phrase - “ca va tourner au vinaigre “ - used by my mother, bitterly, to someone on the phone, or the pop of the dog fleas Pierre and I picked from our terrier and flicked onto the barbecue, or the appalling intimacy of my first kiss, or the body blow of my mother’s death, or the chaos of Pierre’s wedding, or the aching realization that dawned when my father said “Mesopotamia” instead of “kitchen”, or the night I shouted at Alex and he swerved, or the morning the doctors gave me the final assessment of my paraplegia and, for want of anything better to do, I glanced at the clock and noted that it was 11:23.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture