"I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment."

"The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."

"How did the party go in Portman Square? I cannot tell you; Juliet was not there. And how did Lady Gaster's party go? Juliet was next me and I do not know."

"I'm tired of Love; I'm still more tired of Rhyme. But money gives me pleasure all the time."

"It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation."

"It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them."

"Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have left the vulgar stuff alone."

"Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This [taking a rosary out of his pocket] is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative."

"Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not."

"Man may […] be master of his fate, but he has a precious poor servant. It is easier to command a lapdog or a mule for a whole day than one's own fate for half-an-hour."

"Death […] people nowadays seem to regard as something odd, whereas it is well known to be the commonest thing in the world."

"I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of my journey will not seem as dull to you as it did to me at the time, or as it does to me now while I write of it. But now I come to think of it, it cannot seem as dull, for I had to walk that wretched thirty miles or so all the day long, whereas you have not even to read it; for I am not going to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end. Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living! For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and eternal."

"I found myself entering that pleasant mood in which all books are conceived (but none written); I was "smoking the enchanted cigarettes" of Balzac, and if this kind of reverie is fatal to action, yet it is so much a factor of happiness that I wasted in the contemplation of that lovely and silent hollow many miles of marching. I suppose if a man were altogether his own master and controlled by no necessity, not even the necessity of expression, all his life would pass away in these sublime imaginings."

"Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer—and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest men are in siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for this is only to suffer one another."

"Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!"

"'… and as to what may be in this book, do not feel timid nor hesitate to enter. There are more mountains than molehills …'"

"Oh! let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about!"

"The Microbe is so very small You cannot make him out at all, But many sanguine people hope To see him through a microscope."

"The Llama is a wooly sort of fleecy hairy goat, With an indolent expression and an undulating throat Like an unsuccessful literary man."

"What! Would you slap the Porcupine? Unhappy child — desist! Alas! That any friend of mine Should turn Tupto-philist."

"The Big Baboon is found upon The plains of Cariboo: He goes about with nothing on (A shocking thing to do). But if he dressed respectably And let his whiskers grow, How like this Big Baboon would be To Mister So-and-so!"

"When people call this beast to mind, They marvel more and more At such a LITTLE tail behind, So LARGE a trunk before."

"Dodgson’s stammer was a good deal under control and could be used defensively (to gain time), or rhetorically to enhance the effect of a story, when the point was near."

"In a stroke, Carroll anticipated key elements of multiple alignment, minimum distance alignment and local alignment that are now central to biological sequence analysis."

"He impressed me mainly as belonging to the type of 'the University Man': a certain externalism of polite propriety, verging towards the conventional. I do not think in my presence he said anything 'funny' or quaint."

"Sometimes our friend’s face looked, when in repose, very sad and worn, and very different from the fun-lit face, with its charming eyes, that we saw when he was telling us those magic tales – tales which seem to have been woven right into the fabric of my life, and to have coloured it always with a tinge of his dreams."

"And how Lewis Carroll loved the country, the woods, and the hay, and wove into his magic stories the flowers and animals we saw there! Sitting with his back to a big tree-trunk, with one of us on his knee – sometimes one on each knee – he would tell us for hours, stories of the Pixies. And every time he came, he had fresh adventures to relate."

"I shall always remember his beautiful twinkling eyes, full of love and laughter, as he told us wonderful stories."

"Except for the straw boater for the river outings, a top hat was always worn and gloves carried."

"As one who was a boy for much of his adult life, he was by our standards something of a fuddy-duddy in his youth."

"It was a soufflé of a speech, light, pleasant, digestible, and nourishing also."

"Dodgson was overcome by the beauty of Cologne Cathedral. I found him leaning against the rails of the Choir and sobbing like a child. When the verger came to show us over the chapels behind the Choir, he got out of the way, he said that he could not bear the harsh voice of the man in the presence of so much beauty."

"My mother is English, and as she was the one who read to us, my early world was A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl. None of them thought it necessary to protect children from darkness. On the contrary, they guided their readers right toward it. This gives one an enormous sense of being respected as a child. Not just of being trusted to handle things as they are, but to be accepted as not entirely good. To be recognized as having darkness within oneself, too."

"Mr. Dodgson had a mathematical, a logical and a philosophical mind; and when these qualities are united to a love of the grotesque, the resultant fancies are sure to have a quite peculiar charm, a charm so much the greater because its source is subtle and eludes all attempts to grasp it. Sometimes he seems to revel in ideas which are not merely illogical but anti-logical."

"We worked together for seven years. Tenniel and other artists declared I would not work with Carroll for seven weeks! I accepted the challenge, but I, for that purpose, adopted quite a new method. No artist is more matter-of-fact or businesslike than myself: to Carroll I was not Hy. F., but someone else, as he was someone else. I was wilful and erratic, bordering on insanity. We therefore got on splendidly."

"He was preoccupied with left and right, as with right and wrong."

"The star that danced at Carroll's birth In high exuberance of mirth Is dancing yet."

"Dodgson of course was a meticulous traveler. He packed each article separately, well wrapped in paper to twice its bulk."

"Rich deposits of perversity crop up in his humor - and his sudden attacks of virtue or sentimentality midway through his own or other persons' jests hint that his imp has suggested to him something particularly unfunny and unpardonable."

"Cramped by his own charts, on a stream itself restricted, his genius directed him to the bottomless ocean of his books, and impelled him to dive under the graciously sparkling surface into the dark swirl of the icy depths."

"Charles, trapped in the cave of his period, was the laughing philosopher who could show others the way out. He spoke the language and played the role of Ariel - the mantle of Prospero ill became him, though he fancied it."

"Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's life in space-time colored his liberated life of the imagination."

"To have known the man was even as great a treat as to read his books. Lewis Carroll was as unlike any other man as his books were unlike any other author's books. It was a relief to meet the pure simple, innocent dreamer of children, after the selfish commercial mind of most authors."

"Charles Dodgson, born a romantic and a rationalist, would have fitted more easily into the world of Voltaire and Goethe than into the one that received him."