Daily Inspiration Quote by Edgar Bergen

It lands like a conspiratorial tap on the shoulder: the oldest trick in show business, dressed up as intimacy. Edgar Bergen wasn’t just an actor; he was a ventriloquist whose entire career depended on making an audience forget the mechanics and buy the relationship. “I’ve never told you the story…” doesn’t simply introduce a tale, it manufactures a private room inside a crowded theater. The question isn’t really seeking information. It’s a handshake, an invitation to suspend disbelief together.

Choosing “Alice in Wonderland” is doing sly extra work. That story is cultural shorthand for disorientation, rule-breaking logic, and a world where voices can be unmoored from bodies - which is, not incidentally, Bergen’s craft. The line winks at the idea of slipping through a narrative looking-glass: once you agree to hear the story, you’ve already accepted that the normal rules of reality are negotiable. For a ventriloquist, that’s oxygen.

There’s also a gentle power move in the phrasing. “Have I?” implies an ongoing relationship with the listener, a shared history you might not remember as clearly as he does. It positions Bergen (or the persona he’s playing) as the keeper of stories, the one who decides what you get to hear and when. On radio, where Bergen became a phenomenon, that mattered: without a face to watch, the voice had to create the whole scene, including the illusion that he’s speaking to you personally. This line is a doorway, and Bergen’s genius is that you step through it willingly.