Quotable Alice

Lewis Carroll's two great Alice stories -- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass -- have entertained and amused both small children and grown adults alike for nearly a century and a half. Set in Victorian England, these wild, remarkable flights of fancy have had a lasting appeal to the world over and are surprisingly modern in their outlook. With Alice's adventures, which take her down a rabbit-hole to Wonderland or through a mirror into a fantastical game of chess, Carroll tells stories that are amusing and witty, but also surprisingly insightful and profound. Many of Carroll's phrases and expressions -- "Curiouser and curiouser," or "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast" -- have entered the language of everyday use.

In Quotable Alice, David W. Barber, whose books include Bach, Beethoven and the Boys and Better Than It Sounds: A Dictionary of Humorous Musical Quotations, brings together the best and most memorable of Carroll's pithy expressions from the Alice books. With the text is a selection of the famous illustrations John Tenniel created for the original editions.