The playful exclamation captures the feeling of encountering a world that keeps becoming stranger than the rules used to explain it.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 2.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 2.
“Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
The riddle is memorable because it originally arrives without a practical answer, making nonsense itself part of the social game at the tea party.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7; the Mad Hatter asks Alice the famous riddle at the tea party.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
The absurd boast celebrates imaginative flexibility and the ability to entertain possibilities before demanding immediate proof.
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter V, “Wool and Water,” printed page 100 / scan leaf 120 in the fully validated 1872 Macmillan first-edition witness on Wikisource. The White Queen tells Alice that with enough practice she sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. This collection retains its 1871 source-year convention while the evidence witness is title-dated 1872; this remains fictional nonsense-logic rather than Lewis Carroll’s literal theory of belief or instruction to accept impossible claims.
“We’re all mad here.”
The Cheshire Cat turns abnormality into a shared condition, humorously questioning who gets to define what counts as normal.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6.
“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
The line praises compression: saying less can sharpen meaning when the words that remain do real work.
Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2; Polonius says this while promising the King and Queen he will be brief, immediately before continuing at comic length. The dramatic irony is part of the line’s context.
“There are colors that we cannot see.”
The fictional journal proposes an unseen color as an explanation for the story’s impossible creature, extending ordinary limits of perception into supernatural horror.
‘The Damned Thing,’ section IV, ‘An Explanation from the Tomb,’ in Can Such Things Be?, Project Gutenberg #4366. ‘There are colors that we cannot see’ appears in Hugh Morgan's fictional October 7 diary entry as he speculates that the invisible creature occupies a color outside ordinary human vision. It is late-nineteenth-century speculative-horror explanation using period scientific language, not a current scientific claim establishing the story's creature or a new human-visible color.
“Fish and visitors stink in three days.”
Hospitality has limits, and the humor works by comparing an overlong visit with something that naturally becomes unpleasant over time.
Poor Richard’s Almanack; a comic maxim about hospitality, boundaries, and overstaying a welcome.
