I know something interesting is sure to happen.
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
If you know Time as well as I do you wouldn’t talk about wasting it.
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
‘Be what you would seem to be’ – or, if you’d like it put more simply – ‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
But isn’t genius a kind of crime against the routine of the past that our time punishes more severely than crime itself, since scholars die in hospitals bleaker than any prison?
– Marcel Proust, The Lemoine Affair
But one moment of hesitation, and you are dead.
– Marcel Proust, The Lemoine Affair
Have confidence, fear nothing, you are still in the midst of life, in history.
– Marcel Proust, The Lemoine Affair
We are all rough drafts where the genius of one epoch is prelude to a masterpiece that it will probably never execute.
– Marcel Proust, The Lemoine Affair
You can call it ‘nonsense’ if you like but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary.
– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass