Lewis Carroll Quotes
I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book.
Carroll, Lewis. The Letters of Lewis Carroll. Edited by Morton N. Cohen, vol. 2, Oxford UP, 1979.
Justice Holmes was explaining the shortcoming of taking words, spoken or written, literally and not looking further to try and determine the actual intent. This becomes a major legal issue when trying to determine the original intent of legislators of the framers of the Constitution. We all have written things which when interpreted to by others end up with a meaning different from what we intended. In the legislative process with the negotiations over wording, committees, and tradeoffs, it is often very hard to determine what the originators had in mind for in many situations they disagreed about the issue but ended up compromising on some specific language which might represent a consensus or might not even represent anyone’s view.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer of children's fiction, notably Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. The poems "Jabberwocky" and The Hunting of the Snark are classified in the genre of literary nonsense. He was also a mathematician, photographer, inventor and Anglican deacon.
