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Who really said it

I'm not crazy. My reality is just different than yours

Not Lewis Carroll — an anonymous line from 2008 Unknown Originator unknown · in circulation since at least January 2008
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Quote Investigator, which has examined this one directly, reports “no substantive evidence supporting the ascription to Lewis Carroll.” The earliest instance it located is a signature block on a Usenet message posted in January 2008 to the newsgroup alt.fiftyplus by someone using the handle Sue — and QI conjectures even she was repeating something already going round, so the originator stays anonymous. The Cheshire Cat picked up the credit in a tweet in March 2011, and Carroll’s own name is attached from January 2012, when a tweet posted the line as “Carroll – Alice in Wonderland”; a padded-out longer wording follows in April 2012. He died in 1898.

Last verified 17 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“I'm not crazy. My reality is just different than yours” Author unknown — not Lewis Carroll. Earliest traced appearance: an anonymous Usenet signature, January 2008. Source: Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Lewis Carroll. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the themes of doubt and character. Theme: "I'm not crazy. My reality is just different than yours". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "I'm not crazy. My reality is just different than yours". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where it actually starts

Claimed source
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Earliest located instance
Usenet, newsgroup alt.fiftyplus, January 2008 — per Quote Investigator
First credited to the Cheshire Cat
March 2011, in a tweet — per Quote Investigator
First credited to Carroll
January 2012, in a tweet — per Quote Investigator
Occurrences in Carroll
Zero, across ten of his English books

“I’m not crazy, my reality is just different than yours.”

Quote Investigator’s transcription of the January 2008 Usenet signature — the earliest appearance anyone has found. Note the comma: the full stop that splits the line into two sentences, and the “My” that follows it, are later tidying.

Quote Investigator: I'm Not Crazy. My Reality Is Just Different Than Yours

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator’s article on this exact saying ↗ is the anchor, and it is unusually blunt: “QI has found no substantive evidence supporting the ascription to Lewis Carroll.” It dates the earliest match to a January 2008 Usenet signature in alt.fiftyplus, then walks the credit forward — a 2009 coffee cup, a 2010 J. C. Penney T-shirt printed with no attribution at all, the Cheshire Cat in March 2011, Carroll in April 2012.
  • We downloaded the Project Gutenberg texts of ten of Carroll’s English books — 2.41 million characters — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ↗ (in two editions), Through the Looking-Glass ↗, The Hunting of the Snark, Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, Three Sunsets and Other Poems, Sylvie and Bruno, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, A Tangled Tale, The Game of Logic and Symbolic Logic — flattened every line break so no phrase could hide across a line ending, and searched the lot. Neither “my reality” nor “not crazy” occurs once. The line is not a variant of something he wrote; there is nothing there to be a variant of.
  • We also ran the phrase through a full-text search of the whole of Wikiquote — an insource: query, which reads the raw wikitext of every page on the site. “my reality is just different” returns zero pages. It is not on Carroll’s page ↗, not on the Wonderland page ↗, and not filed anywhere else on the site. That is an absence of a debunk rather than a debunk — but it does mean nobody has found a home for it either.
  • What Carroll actually wrote about madness is a logic joke, not a slogan. In chapter six of Wonderland ↗ the Cheshire Cat tells Alice a Hatter lives one way and a March Hare the other: “Visit either you like: they’re both mad.” Alice objects that she does not want to go among mad people. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” The Cat then tries to prove its own madness by comparing itself to a dog. That is the register — deadpan and argumentative — and the line on the poster is nothing like it.

No rights badge, deliberately. Carroll’s own books have been out of copyright for generations, but this line is not from them, and the earliest appearance anyone has traced is an anonymous 2008 forum signature with no identifiable author and no publication we could date. There is no work here whose status we could honestly report.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

Three separate credits have been attached to this line, in the order you would expect: none, then a character, then an author.

Lewis Carroll, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Refuted

Quote Investigator found no substantive evidence ↗ for it, and the phrase occurs in none of the ten Carroll books we searched. He died in 1898; the earliest trace of the line is from 2008.

The Cheshire Cat Refuted

The Cat got the credit in a March 2011 tweet, per QI’s chronology ↗ — three years after the line was already circulating with no attribution at all. The Cat’s actual madness lines are in chapter six of Wonderland ↗ and read nothing like it.

Lewis Carroll — “I’m not strange, weird, off, nor crazy…” Refuted

A padded-out wording that appeared in April 2012 — after the short form had already been credited to Carroll that January — and has since been printed as the Cheshire Cat’s in a 2015 Chicago Tribune column and a 2024 Uncle John’s bathroom reader, both logged by QI ↗. It is later than the short form, not earlier, which is the opposite of what a genuine Victorian original would look like.

What can be stated flatly: the line is in none of Carroll’s books, and the oldest instance anyone has located is a 2008 forum signature ↗ with no author’s name on it. Who first wrote it is genuinely unknown.

Context

Why this one sticks to Carroll

Carroll is a magnet for this kind of line because Wonderland really does have a scene about being mad and not minding — so a reader who half-remembers the Cheshire Cat has somewhere to file a sentence that sounds defiant and slightly pleased with itself. The attribution chain here is visible in the dates: unattributed for three years, then a character, then the author, each step adding authority the line never had.

The J. C. Penney T-shirt is the tell. In August 2010 a department-store advertisement printed the sentence with no author at all — because at that point there was no author to print. The name arrived afterwards, to make a slogan sound like literature.

Unattributed for three years, then a cat, then a Victorian mathematician.

Read the full story

Quote Investigator’s chronology is worth reading in order: a January 2008 Usenet signature, a May 2008 tweet, a coffee cup in a 2009 role-playing forum, the 2010 T-shirt, a February 2011 tweet still with no attribution, then March 2011 — the Cheshire Cat — and January 2012, “Carroll – Alice in Wonderland”.

By 2015 a Chicago Tribune columnist could write “like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat” and quote the longer version as though from the book, and by 2024 it had reached a printed quotation collection. None of that adds evidence; it adds repetition, which is a different thing.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Doubt Character

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: I'm Not Crazy. My Reality Is Just Different Than Yoursquoteinvestigator.com

The full attribution history, from the 2008 Usenet signature to the 2024 bathroom reader.
Wikiquote: Lewis Carrollen.wikiquote.org

His sourced quotations and his misattributed list. This line is on neither.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (full text)gutenberg.org

The book it gets credited to. Searched; no match.
Through the Looking-Glass (full text)gutenberg.org

Also searched; also no match.
Wikipedia: Lewis Carrollen.wikipedia.org

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832–1898 — and what he actually published.

Who it wasn’t

About the name on the graphic

Lewis Carroll

1832–1898 · English author, mathematician & logician

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson — Lewis Carroll on the title page — taught mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford for most of his adult life, and wrote the two Alice books and a shelf of logic puzzles alongside it. His real sentences are odd in a particular way: precise, deadpan, and usually about the rules of language rather than about how you feel. That is worth knowing, because the lines invented for him are almost always the opposite — warm, encouraging, and about you.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

No located source. Earliest documented instance: a Usenet signature block posted to the newsgroup alt.fiftyplus in January 2008, as documented in “Quote Origin: I’m Not Crazy. My Reality Is Just Different Than Yours,” Quote Investigator, 16 December 2025.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I'm not crazy. My reality is just different than yours’?” Last verified 17 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/im-not-crazy-my-reality-is-just-different-than-yours/

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