The Alice Behind Wonderland Quotes

“Alice asked the fateful question. Would Mr. Dodgson kindly one day write down this quite extraordinary story and in due course present it to her as a gift?”
― Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland

“They were also listening with rapt intent to a story that Charles was telling them about a little girl who had fallen down a rabbit-hole and into a curious new world. Duckworth”
― Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland

“His utter fascination with all of these girls, his need to picture them with or without clothing, his need to make them happy, to amuse them, to have them think of him as a friend and for him to feel free to do the same, his need to buy them dresses and stockings and bonnets and shoes, and on rare occasions to exhibit brief flashes of physical affection, reflect an aspect of Charles Dodgson’s character that puzzles and intrigues to this day.”
― Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland

“The new art took off from its standing start with the lightning speed of a gazelle.”
― Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland

“For photography had a kind of manageable madness to it. There was, for example, the slightly crazy upside-down-ness of it all, the sight of the inverted image on the ground-glass screen, the now entirely different meanings of left and right, the bizarre concepts of focus and out of focus. In particular, he was wide-eyed at the darkroom conjuring tricks by which chemistry, a discipline of logic and order, was employed to create images out of the very air—or so it seemed, and the still further use of this same science to keep these new-made images fixed for all time, and with no ready explanation for why.”
― Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland

“So the trinity was now in place: Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddell, and a large folding box camera, all together, and in a pretty springtime garden hidden away in the separate and cloistered world at the center of the University of Oxford.”
― Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland

“The first was that he had been given a nom de plume and was on the brink of a new career. The second was that he had met and befriended the young lady who would be the central focus of his life for the coming years, and would provide him the name with which he would be forever associated; and now there was this third: he and Reginald Southey were friends because of their shared interest in a new and fast-developing art. Both young men—one a mathematician, the other a physician—were photographers.”
― Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland

“Here come I, my name is Jowett, There is no knowledge but I know it; I am the Master of this College; What I don’t know just isn’t Knowledge.”
― Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland

“he would have thought it unusually cruel for even the kindest deity to rob the Reverend Tait of so many small girls.)”
― Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland

“That so many of the women in his books were strong and cruel also puzzles many. His mother, Frances, was agreeable and kind, so we must suppose that the housemaids she employed—recorded in Charles’s diaries as being mostly fat, arrogant, and generally disagreeable—provided the models.”
― Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland

“A collector who has unopened books is to me an enigma,” he once wrote. “He cannot, of course, read them; and no-one can deny that if a book cannot be read, it loses its purpose of existence.”
― Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland

“and his youngest sister, Henrietta, lived to a great age, also beside the sea, with a vast collection of cats—having previously traveled around England carrying a portable stove that allowed her to cook her beloved sausages in the privacy of her various bedrooms. She also once mistakenly took an alarm clock to church with her, instead of a Bible, with predictably catastrophic results.”
― Simon Winchester, The Alice Behind Wonderland