The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (The Annotated Books)

by Lewis Carroll

The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.

We all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death, and when we try to find out what the Castle authorities want us to do, we are shifted from one bumbling bureaucrat to another.

Laughter, declares Reinhold Niebuhr in one of his finest sermons, is a kind of no man’s land between faith and despair. We preserve our sanity by laughing at life’s surface absurdities, but the laughter turns to bitterness and derision if directed toward the deeper irrationalities of evil and death.

she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out,

She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it),

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”