"She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)"
About this Quote
A little dagger of self-knowledge, slipped into a parenthesis like it’s nothing. Carroll lets Alice be both precocious and plainly human: the child who can articulate the correct moral lesson and still walk straight past it. The joke lands because it refuses the sentimental Victorian fantasy of childhood innocence-as-virtue. Alice isn’t an emblem; she’s a mind in motion, capable of reason and just as capable of ignoring it.
The line’s machinery is classic Carroll: a prim, “generally” toned opening that sounds like responsible character narration, then the deflationary aside. That parenthetical is doing all the work. It mimics the way conscience actually operates - not as a thunderclap, but as a quiet annotation we’d rather skim. The rhythm also sketches an internal split: a rational self dispensing “very good advice” and an impulsive self collecting it like trivia. Carroll doesn’t moralize; he miniaturizes the moral into comedy, which is why it sticks.
Context matters: Alice’s adventures are basically a prolonged stress test of sense-making, a child dropped into a logic maze run by lunatics and rules lawyers. In such a world, “good advice” is simultaneously necessary and useless. The subtext is less “children don’t listen” than “knowing better doesn’t automatically make you better,” a sly rebuke to didactic literature that assumes instruction equals transformation.
Carroll’s wit is gentle, but not soft. He’s letting the reader recognize their own habits: the to-do list, the self-help maxim, the sober plan - and the familiar, almost affectionate failure to follow through.
The line’s machinery is classic Carroll: a prim, “generally” toned opening that sounds like responsible character narration, then the deflationary aside. That parenthetical is doing all the work. It mimics the way conscience actually operates - not as a thunderclap, but as a quiet annotation we’d rather skim. The rhythm also sketches an internal split: a rational self dispensing “very good advice” and an impulsive self collecting it like trivia. Carroll doesn’t moralize; he miniaturizes the moral into comedy, which is why it sticks.
Context matters: Alice’s adventures are basically a prolonged stress test of sense-making, a child dropped into a logic maze run by lunatics and rules lawyers. In such a world, “good advice” is simultaneously necessary and useless. The subtext is less “children don’t listen” than “knowing better doesn’t automatically make you better,” a sly rebuke to didactic literature that assumes instruction equals transformation.
Carroll’s wit is gentle, but not soft. He’s letting the reader recognize their own habits: the to-do list, the self-help maxim, the sober plan - and the familiar, almost affectionate failure to follow through.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 1865 — line appears in Chapter 1. See Project Gutenberg public-domain text. |
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