After Alice Quotes

“In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“The world pauses for royalty and deformity alike, and sometimes one can’t tell the difference.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“A story in a book has its own intentions, even if unknowable to the virgin reader, who just lollops along at her own pace regardless of the author’s strategies, and gets where she will. After all, a book can be set aside for weeks, or for good. (Burned in the grate.) Alternatively, a story can be adored for centuries. But it cannot be derailed. A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking. It is progressive and inevitable as the seasons. Winter still comes after autumn though you may have died over the summer.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“Sooner or later we grow into deserving our own deaths, somehow.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“History is a long time in the making.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“As for dreams, they are powered by urgent desire, even if that desire is only to escape the quotidian.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“She found her regard for Mr. Winter turning to something like suspicion—though notice how often we lower suspicion upon others to avoid putting ourselves under scrutiny. Now”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“Winter still comes after autumn though you may have died over the summer.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“Marmalade has to make its own way in life, like the rest of us, she thought.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“It’s my belief that our lives are stolen from us. Ornamented with pinnate leaves and colored frills, we exist only as a consolation for others. I don’t feel fulfilled. Indeed, some days I scarcely feel at all.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“You lost your copper as well as your faith in wishes, and prayers.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“Some realities are too onerous to be borne by nations, let alone by children.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“There is a limit to the nonsense even a dream can attempt.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“All of life hinges on what one does next, until finally one makes the wrong choice.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“After all is said and done,” said the Dormouse, “there is nothing to be done. Or said.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“Our private lives are like a colony of worlds expanding, contracting, breathing universal air into separate knowledges. Or like several packs of cards shuffled together by an expert anonymous hand, and dealt out in a random, amused or even hostile way.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“You know our Alice. She plays hide-and-seek but sometimes forgets to ask someone to look for her.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“Don’t take the advice of anyone you meet here. We’re all mad.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“Night is brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“We all have our shortcomings, it seems, though some are less visible than others.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“So Oxford, at its inception a huddle of theologicians and divines, grew into a city of dreams, and much good may come of that. Little surprise that Middle-earth and Narnia were both discovered here.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“Those who are roped into bed at night often fall into delusions of flight.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“Only, sometimes, in the text of a book here and there, we tap the page with a finger and say, “This is what my lost days were like. Something like this.” But even as we turn to the fellow in the bed beside us to say, “Yes, this passage here,” whatever it is we recognized has already disguised itself, changed in that split instant. There is no hope that our companion can see what we, just for a moment, saw anew and hailed with a startled, glad heart. Literary pleasure, and a sense of recognition and identification, real though they are, burn off like alcohol in the flame of the next heated moment.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“After all, a book can be set aside for weeks, or for good. (Burned in the grate.) Alternatively, a story can be adored for centuries. But it cannot be derailed. A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking. It is progressive and inevitable as the seasons. Winter still comes after autumn though you may have died over the summer.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“The fatal day rarely announces itself, but comes disguised as midsummer. Our private lives are like a colony of worlds expanding, contracting, breathing universal air into separate knowledges. Or like several packs of cards shuffled together by an expert anonymous hand, and dealt out in a random, amused or even hostile way.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“Only, sometimes, in the text of a book here and there, we tap the page with a finger and say, “This is what my lost days were like. Something like this.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“He spoke in one of the American accents; Lydia couldn’t distinguish among them. To her they all sounded dry and tinny. Almost quack-like.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“The master is bringing Darwin through to examine lower life-forms, Rhoda. Straighten your spine or you’ll be mistook for a mollusk.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“Lot of talky-talk in there, they had to open the windows to let the words out,”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice

“The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.”
― Gregory Maguire, After Alice