Wit & Attitude Quote by Lewis Carroll

Carroll’s line weaponizes politeness as a scalpel: it rejects the tidy little tribunal where “normal” people get to diagnose everyone else. The phrasing is a mock trial in miniature. “Not strange, weird, off, nor crazy” stacks synonyms the way society stacks labels, as if repetition could turn discomfort into a medical fact. Carroll’s speaker doesn’t argue on the accuser’s terms; he swats them away with a calm grammatical rhythm that makes the judgment sound petty.

The pivot is “my reality,” a deliberately slippery phrase from a writer who built entire worlds on slipperiness. Carroll, a logician in fantasy clothing, understood that what gets called madness often looks like a failure to share premises. In Alice, the rules are consistent, just not ours. Words mean what power says they mean, time can sulk, animals litigate etiquette, and authority is a performance of certainty. The subtext: if you feel destabilized, check the furniture of your own mind before you start prescribing restraints for mine.

It also lands as a quiet defense of imagination against the Victorian obsession with propriety and classification. Carroll isn’t pleading for tolerance; he’s exposing how “crazy” functions as social shorthand for “inconvenient.” By reframing difference as a parallel reality rather than a defect, the line flips the gaze back on the audience: your normal is not neutral, just familiar.