I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.

No wonder Wonderland isn't funny to read anymore: We live there full time. We need a break from it.

Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.

If one could drown in the grass, thought Elphie, that might be the best way to die.

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

... the decades looked on and didn't notice her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn't see revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny.

...but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn't hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin.