From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.

This line comes from Dr. Seuss’s beginner reader The Cat in the Hat (1957), spoken by the Cat as he arrives at Sally and her brother’s house on a rainy day while their mother is out. The children are bored and constrained by the weather and by the fish’s insistence on proper behavior. The Cat’s entrance introduces playful disorder and a promise of imaginative possibility, setting the tone for the escalating antics that follow. The rhyme’s sweeping “here/there” framing functions like a showman’s patter, inviting the children (and the reader) to see the ordinary domestic space as suddenly open to surprise.

The couplet is a compact manifesto for Seussian wonder: the world is full of oddity if you’re willing to look. By pairing simple directional opposites (“here/there”) with the expansive “everywhere,” the Cat collapses distance and turns the mundane into a stage for comedy and invention. In the story, the line also works as persuasion—an argument against boredom and rigid propriety—suggesting that fun is not confined to special places or occasions but can erupt in any setting. More broadly, it captures Seuss’s faith in imagination as a way to re-enchant daily life.