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The Phantom Tollbooth was written when I was trying to avoid doing something else—something I was supposed to do. Some people are like that. I’m one of them.
I paint when I'm really trying to avoid doing something else; I find it to be stress relieving.
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Why did I have to learn so many things that didn’t seem to have any relevance to my life at the time? The difficulty of understanding the world and the strange, illogical way it operated. And mostly, the large amount of time I spent being uninterested in doing or learning anything.
After a while, it became a kind of game—he trying to figure out ways to draw things the way he wanted, and me inventing things that would cause him maximum difficulty.
That's hilarious.
Among them are the Triple Demons of Compromise: One is short and fat, one is tall and thin, and the third is exactly like the other two. For some reason, they were never illustrated.
Maybe someday I’ll get back to it when I’m trying to avoid doing something else.
I’m certainly glad that it’s a nice day for a trip,” he concluded hopefully, for, at the moment, this was the one thing he definitely knew.
“Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you’re going. Of course, some people never go beyond Expectations, but my job is to hurry them along whether they like it or not.
Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.
“since you got here by not thinking, it seems reasonable to expect that, in order to get out, you must start thinking.”
“it is our most valuable possession, more precious than diamonds. It marches on, it and tide wait for no man,
“I never knew words could be so confusing,” Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog’s ear. “Only when you use a lot to say a little,” answered Tock.
It was said by everyone that ‘Rhyme and Reason answer all problems.’
“Be very quiet,” advised the duke, “for it goes without saying.”
🤫
“Of course, the half bakery,” snapped the king. “Where do you think half-baked ideas come from?
“Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things.”
“What a silly system.” The boy laughed. “Then your head keeps changing its height and you always see things in a different way?
Besides, being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it’s a matter of not knowing where you aren’t—and I don’t care at all about where I’m not.”
“Perhaps someday you can have one city as easy to see as Illusions and as hard to forget as Reality,”
“But from now on I’m going to have a very good reason before I make up my mind about anything. You can lose too much time jumping to Conclusions.”
“Infinity is a dreadfully poor place. They can never manage to make ends meet.”
😂
“You’ll find,” he remarked gently, “that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort.”
“NONSENSE!” bellowed the Mathemagician. “Everyone understands numbers. No matter what language you speak, they always mean the same thing. A seven is a seven anywhere in the world.”
“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.”
“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.”
“but you had the courage to try; and what you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.”
