The Phantom Tollbooth

by Norton Juster

“When God wants to punish you, he grants your wishes.”

Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered.

there are no wrong roads to anywhere.

“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,

Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.

“In my family we all start on the ground and grow up, and we never know how far until we actually get there.” “What a silly system.” The boy laughed. “Then your head keeps changing its height and you always see things in a different way? Why, when you’re fifteen things won’t look at all the way they did when you were ten, and at twenty everything will change again.”

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.”

the most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what’s in between,

“No one paid any attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at last a very strange thing began to happen. Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear. Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible. There was nothing to see at all.”

“everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best.”

For there’s always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing,

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

It’s true that there are many lands you’ve still to visit (some of which are not even on the map) and wonderful things to see (that no one has yet imagined), but we’re quite sure that if you really want to, you’ll find a way to reach them all by yourself.