Lost

But now? Now? Children in the twentieth and this early twenty-first century hated the Alice books, couldn't read them, and why should they? Their world had strayed into madness long ago. Look at the planet. Rain is acid, poisonous. Sun causes cancer. Sex=death. Children murder other children. Parents lie, leaders lie, the churches have less moral credibility than Benetton ads. And the faces of missing children staring out from milk cartons-imagine all those poor Lost Boys, and Lost Girls, not in Neverland but lost here, lost now. No wonder Wonderland isn't funny anymore: We live there full-time. We need a break from it.

How easily Neverland is corrupted into the deserted island of Lord of the Flies. How quickly Tinkerbell regresses to being one of the flies pestering the gouged eye sockets of the pig that the lost boys butcher.

It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?

The sun is the biggest metaphor. The sun is the first candle. She can get there by its light.

How she wanted to put away adult things and go back to seeing through a looking-glass, darkly.

If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.

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

The chronic fun of writing, the distraction of it, was not knowing.

The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. . . .