The Phantom Tollbooth

by Norton Juster

For always remember that while it is wrong to use too few, it is often far worse to use too many.”

“There’s nothing to it,” they all said in chorus, “if you have a magic staff.” Then six of them canceled themselves out and simply disappeared. “But it’s only a big pencil,” the Humbug objected, tapping at it with his cane. “True enough,” agreed the Mathemagician; “but once you learn to use it, there’s no end to what you can do.”

“You’ll find,” he remarked gently, “that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort.”

“Because, my young friends,” he muttered sourly, “what could be more important than doing unimportant things? If you stop to do enough of them, you’ll never get to where you’re going.”

“If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won’t have the time. For there’s always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if it weren’t for that dreadful magic staff, you’d never know how much time you were wasting.”

Why, if you stay here, you’ll never have to think again—and with a little practice you can become a monster of habit, too.”

have a better idea,” said Milo. “You do?” interrupted the giant, losing any desire to eat at all. “If it’s one thing I can’t swallow, it’s ideas: they’re so hard to digest.”

“I’ll steal your sense of purpose, take your sense of duty, destroy your sense of proportion—and, but for one thing, you’d be helpless yet.” “What’s that?” asked Milo fearfully. “As long as you have the sound of laughter,” he groaned unhappily, “I cannot take your sense of humor—and, with it, you’ve nothing to fear from me.”

“You must never feel badly about making mistakes,” explained Reason quietly, “as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.”

“but it’s not just learning things that’s important. It’s learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters.”

“They’re shouting for you,” she said with a smile. “But I could never have done it,” he objected, “without everyone else’s help.” “That may be true,” said Reason gravely, “but you had the courage to try; and what you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.”

so many things are possible just as long as you don’t know they’re impossible.”