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Through the Looking-Glass - Lewis Carroll

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never never forget!’
“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”

“O Tiger-lily,” said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind, “I wish you could talk!”
“We can talk,” said the Tiger-lily: “when there’s anybody worth talking to.”

The Red Queen shook her head, “You may call it “nonsense” if you like,” she said, “but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

‘He’s dreaming now,’ said Tweedledee: ‘and what do you think he’s dreaming about?’
Alice said ‘Nobody can guess that.’
‘Why, about you!’ Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. ‘And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?’
‘Where I am now, of course,’ said Alice.
‘Not you!’ Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. ‘You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!’
‘If that there King was to wake,’ added Tweedledum, ‘you’d go out — bang! — just like a candle!’
‘I shouldn’t!’ Alice exclaimed indignantly. ‘Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?’
‘Ditto’ said Tweedledum.
‘Ditto, ditto!’ cried Tweedledee.
He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying, ‘Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.’
‘Well, it no use your talking about waking him,’ said Tweedledum, ‘when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.’
‘I am real!’ said Alice and began to cry.
‘You won’t make yourself a bit realler by crying,’ Tweedledee remarked: ‘there’s nothing to cry about.’
‘If I wasn’t real,’ Alice said — half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous — ‘I shouldn’t be able to cry.’
‘I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?’ Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
‘I know they’re talking nonsense,’ Alice thought to herself: ‘and it’s foolish to cry about it.’ So she brushed away her tears, and went on as cheerfully as she could.

“You know,” he added very gravely, “it’s one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle — to get one’s head cut off.”

“I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.”
“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s not use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

“My name is Alice, but — “
“It’s a stupid name enough!” Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. “What does it mean?”
“Must a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully.
“Of course it must,” Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: “my name means the shape I am — and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like your, you might be any shape, almost.”

Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream ?

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The importance of being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl.

I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

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La Historia Interminable - Michael Ende

• ”- Quisiera que siempre fuera así -dijo él. -Siempre es sólo un momento -respondió ella.”

• “Mira, gorgoteó la Morla, somos viejas, pequeño, demasiado viejas y hemos vivido bastante. Hemos vivido demasiado. Para quien sabe tanto como nosotras nada es importante ya. Todo se repite eternamente: el día y la noche, el verano y el invierno.. el mundo está vacío y no tiene sentido. Todo se mueve en círculos. Lo que aparece debe desaparecer y lo que nace debe morir. Todo pasa: el bien y el mal, la estupidez y la sabiduría, la belleza y la fealdad. Todo está vacío. Nada es verdad. Nada es importante.”

• “Justo en el momento en que Atreyu había atravesado la tétrica puerta de la Ciudad de los Espectros y comenzado el vagabundeo por las retorcidas calles que terminaría, de forma tan funesta, en el sucio patio interior, Fújur el blanco dragón de la suerte, había hecho un descubrimiento sorprendente.”

• “Pero esa es otra historia y debe ser contada en otra ocasión.”

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Lemony Snicket's A series of unfortunate events (The end)

“If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable.

In this way, the story of the Baudelaire orphans is like an onion, and if you insist on reading each and every thin, papery layer in A Series of Unfortunate Events, your only reward will be 170 chapters of misery in your library and countless tears in your eyes. Even if you have read the first twelve volumes of the Baudelaires’ story, it is not too late to stop peeling away the layers, and to put this book back on the shelf to wither away while you read something less complicated and overwhelming. The end of this unhappy chronicle is like its bad beginning, as each misfortune only reveals another, and another, and another, and only those with the stomach for this strange and bitter tale should venture any farther into the Baudelaire onion. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.”

“Of course, it is quite possible to be in the dark in the dark, but there are so many secrets in the world that it is likely that you are always in the dark about one thing or another, whether you are in the dark in the dark or in the dark not in the dark, although the sun can go down so quickly that you may be in the in the dark about being in the dark, only to look around and find yourself no longer in the dark about being in the dark, but in the dark in the dark nontheless, not only because of the dark, but because of the ballerinas in the dark, who are not in the dark about the dark, but also not in the dark about the locked cabinet, and you may be in the dark about the ballerinas digging up the locked cabinet in the dark, even though you are no longer in the dark about being in the dark, and so you are in fact in the dark about being in the dark, even though you are not in the dark about being in the dark, and so you may fall into the hole that the ballerinas have dug, which is dark, in the dark, and in the park.”

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Fight club - Chuck Palahniuk.

“People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.”

“You buy furniture, you tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. buy the sofa, then for a couple of years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled, then the right set of dishes, then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.
Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things that you used to own, now they own you.”

“Nothing is static. Everything is falling apart. I know this because Tyler knows this.”

“All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.”

“This is a chemical burn, and it will hurt worse than you’ve ever been burned”

1st Rule: You do not talk about FIGHT CLUB.
2nd Rule: You DO NOT talk about FIGHT CLUB.
3rd Rule: If someone says “stop” or goes limp, taps out the fight is over.
4th Rule: Only two guys to a fight.
5th Rule: One fight at a time.
6th Rule: No shirts, no shoes.
7th Rule: Fights will go on as long as they have to.
8th Rule: If this is your first night at FIGHT CLUB, you HAVE to fight.

“I knew this would happen. You’re such a flake. You love me. You ignore me. You save my life, then you cook my mother into soap.”

“Fuck that shit, Maybe you’re my schizophrenic hallucination.
I was here first.
Tyler says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, well let’s just see who’s here last.”

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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”
“Why, what did she tell you?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.”

“The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.”

“Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.”

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El Principito.

“Las personas mayores nunca son capaces de comprender las cosas por sí mismas, y es muy aburrido para los niños tener que darles una y otra vez explicaciones.”

“Pero nosotros, que comprendemos la vida, nos burlamos de los números.”

“No era más que un zorro semejante a cien mil otros. Pero yo le hice mi amigo y ahora es único en el mundo.”

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