(I still need to come back and read Through the Looking-Glass.)

I liked this a lot better when I read it as a teenager. Honestly, I had a hard time keeping my interest and my mind kept wandering. Granted I did the audiobook this time. Print might have worked better this time around.

However, I still feel like there are some really relevant existential quotes that resonated with me as a child. I wrote some in my day planner when I read it then. I wanted to remember that I needed to have a purpose a destination, and a direction in life. That Cat had a good point. If you don't know where you want to go, it doesn't matter where or which way you go.

...

"'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'

'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the cat.

'I don't care much where—' said Alice.

'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

'—so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation.

'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the cat, 'if you only walk long enough.'"

...

"'We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'

'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.

'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'"

...

"Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"

...

"And the moral of that is—"The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.""

(This makes sense in our capitalist society. Where there is an excess, it begs that there is a lack elsewhere.)

'Oh, I know!' exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this last remark, 'it's a vegetable. It doesn't look like one, but it is.'

'I quite agree with you,' said the Duchess; 'and the moral of that is—"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.""

'I think I should understand that better,' Alice said very politely, 'if I had it written down: but I can't quite follow it as you say it.'

'That's nothing to what I could say if I chose,' the Duchess replied, in a pleased tone."

(Yeah, I couldn't follow the Duchess either, Alice... Putting it more simply—BE AUTHENTIC.)

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Likewise Book Reviews

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