Peter and Alice

PETER PAN: Any time they’re happy, they can’t wait to be sad.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Never here and now, always there and later.
PETER PAN: Always looking at the clock.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Looking over their shoulder.
PETER PAN: Then back at the clock.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Time for this, time for that, never time for “well, here we are, isn’t it glorious?”
PETER PAN: Go to a party, look at the cake, long for the cake, reach for the cake–
ALICE IN WONDERLAND: Don’t eat the cake.
PETER PAN: I love cake

ALICE: Lord, as many days as are left to me, I’ll never forget those letters burning… It was the cruelest thing I’d ever seen: all the lovely words, all his heart’s devotion, gone. As if they never existed

PETER: He loved Michael most… Uncle Jim always said that he made Peter Pan by rubbing the five of us violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. But that’s not true. It was Michael, bold and fearless Michael… I was never bold. I always had fear.
ALICE: Of what?
PETER: What does every child fear? … Captain Hook

PETER: You plain mesmerized us.
BARRIE: I made you famous.
PETER: I didn’t ask for it.
ALICE: Didn’t you?
PETER: For god’s sake, I was a child. I didn’t know anything!
ALICE: You listened. You laughed. You sparkled for him. You wanted him to look at you most, to look at you longest. To love you best.
CARROLL: You’re my favorite, Alice. You’ll always be my favorite

ALICE considers BARRIE.
ALICE: In truth he was a little man.
PETER: Not when he told his stories

PETER: That’s their power, these writers, these men of words. Trap baited and sprung, and before you know it you have to chew your leg off to get free.

PETER: Grown men do not “return home and go on with their lives.” That’s what children do. Children pass gaily through life with no sense of the weight of events… Grown ups look in the mirror, and then look at the clock… They walk into an empty house that feels emptier every day that passes, for it brings them ever-closer to the final and inescapable loneliness: that last echoing room where you are truly alone.

CARROLL: It’s a simple thing to get lost, you know. You glance around and suddenly everything’s changed. Nothing’s like it was, even you in the looking glass. Who you thought you were, you’re not… And you don’t need to be exploring another c-c-c-continent either. You can lose your way right here in Oxford if you’re not careful. Right over that hedge.

CARROLL: Like two cryptographers, unlocking the same secret.
ALICE: I don’t know that word.
CARROLL: That’s a word you learn when you’re eleven, along with crepuscular and cantilevered… So if we can’t be cryptographers, perhaps we’d best be polar explorers, roped together lest a crevasse or snow-blindness make us lose our way

ALICE: Peter Pan.
Beat.
PETER: There were five of us.
ALICE: Well, this is rich