Meaning

The White Queen's cheerful boast turns the usual relationship between belief and reality on its head. Most people treat impossibility as a firm boundary, but she treats it as a kind of daily exercise, something to practice before the day has even properly begun. The line is a celebration of imaginative flexibility, suggesting that the willingness to entertain ideas that seem beyond reach is not foolishness but a skill worth cultivating.

Context

This line appears in Lewis Carroll's 1871 sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, during a conversation between Alice and the White Queen. The Queen introduces the idea that in her world one must practice believing unlikely things, and she offers this proud claim as evidence of her own ability. Carroll uses the moment to gently satirize rigid thinking, while also gesturing toward something genuinely useful: that creativity, invention, and progress often begin with someone being willing to take an improbable idea seriously.

About the author

The White Queen is a character created by Lewis Carroll, the pen name of the Oxford mathematician and writer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Carroll built the Looking-Glass world around the logic of a chess game, and the White Queen is one of its most endearing figures, kind but chaotic, wise in unexpected ways. Carroll's background in formal logic gave his nonsense a unique structure, and lines like this one work precisely because they are delivered with such earnest confidence, making the absurd feel almost reasonable.