Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you…
Quote
Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
The story behind this quote
In chapter II of Through the Looking-Glass, Alice has just met the Red Queen in the garden of live flowers. Suddenly the Queen seizes her hand and they run, “Now! Now! Faster! Faster!”, until Alice, exhausted, is propped against a tree. To her surprise, everything is as it was: “Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time!” In her country, Alice protests, you would generally get somewhere else if you ran very fast for a long time. “A slow sort of country!” says the Queen, and explains the rule with the line. Alice would rather not try, and the Queen good-naturedly offers her a dry biscuit.
Lewis Carroll, the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, published the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1871; its world is laid out as a chess game, and Alice, a pawn, must reach the eighth square to become a queen.
The Queen’s rule has passed into science and economics: the “Red Queen” names a situation in which everyone must keep evolving, or working harder, merely to keep up.
The source
Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 2 (the Red Queen), 1871
Checked word for word in the work itself.
More quotes by Lewis Carroll
Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
Author
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Oxford, wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass as Lewis Carroll. Their logic games and nonsense verse delight readers of every age.
Quotes by Lewis Carroll