Alice's Adventures in Wonderland selected passages.

Change is funny until it begins happening to the self. Growing larger or smaller is less bewildering than not knowing who one is becoming.

A strange world becomes less frightening once strangeness is admitted as the rule. Madness feels different when everyone is already living inside it.

Orderly advice sounds funniest in a world that has abandoned order. Seriousness loses its footing when justice itself has become nonsense.

When judgment comes before understanding, fairness has already been lost. The absurdity is playful, but the warning is sharp.

Change is most unsettling when it reaches the self before the mind can explain it. We may wake up altered before we know what has happened.

Power becomes absurd when it mistakes anger for justice. A command can sound childish and still do real harm.

Growing older sounds like both a relief and a sentence. Childhood imagines adulthood through the lessons it cannot escape.

Arbitrary power is frightening partly because it becomes routine. When threats are everywhere, absurdity stops being harmless.

Wonderland makes even simple categories feel unstable. The self becomes harder to hold when every question changes shape.

Even strange companions can become dear when the world is confusing. Farewell hurts most when we did not expect attachment to grow.

Adventure frightens and attracts for the same reason: it changes the one who enters it. Regret and curiosity often travel together.

Old fears can harden into inherited judgments. What one creature calls truth may simply be pain passed down as certainty.

Longing can make even a simple thing sing. Desire is not always dignified, but it often reveals how deeply something is wanted.

The self can feel uncertain when memory no longer gives a steady answer. Change is frightening because it interrupts our own continuity.

Lessons offered too quickly can become another kind of nonsense. Not every experience becomes wiser by being forced into a moral.

Urgency makes nonsense feel official. Childhood enters strange worlds by obeying commands no one has earned the right to give.

Even absurd desire wants to be sung. Nonsense becomes charming when it reveals how ceremonious appetite can be.

The self becomes mysterious when change outruns explanation. Wonder can feel like panic when it happens inside one’s own life.

Change can arrive from minute to minute, leaving the self hard to name. Becoming is not always a graceful process.

Astonishment can survive in a world already strange. Wonder renews itself when the next impossibility still feels fresh.

Speech can be a way of refusing disappearance. In confusion, continuing to talk may be how a child keeps hold of herself.

Identity may be something still ahead of us, not only something remembered. Wonder asks what kind of self might come next.

Some mornings make us wonder whether we are still the same person we were yesterday. Change is unsettling because it reaches the self before it can be named.

Ritual without welcome can feel more absurd than emptiness. A table set for tea means little if no one truly receives you.

Curiosity often crosses the threshold before caution has found its voice. Many stories begin with one step taken too quickly.

Nonsense can still feel like an invitation. The music of a strange world may be bewildering and welcoming at once.

Even the smallest subject can become a world if attention turns toward it. Wonder sometimes arrives through an absurdly thorough lesson.

Contradiction can wear down even a patient child. Losing one’s temper may begin as the need to defend a small, battered self.

The hunger for a moral can be another kind of nonsense. Some experiences should be allowed to remain strange before they are explained.

Some jokes belong to the page as much as to the adventure. A small aside can make reading feel like a shared secret with the child holding the book.