Norton Juster Quotes
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You see, to tall men I'm a midget, and to short men I'm a giant; to the skinny ones I'm a fat man, and to the fat ones I'm a thin man.
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You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and not get wet.
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Do you think it will rain? Milo: But I thought you were the Weather Man? No, I'm the Whether man, for it is more important to know whether there will be weather, whether than what the weather will be.
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And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters
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Let me try once more," Milo said in an effort to explain. "In other words--" "You mean you have other words?" cried the bird happily. "Well, by all means, use them. You're certainly not doing very well with the ones you have now.
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...it's very much like your trying to reach infinity. You know that it's there, you just don't know where-but just because you can never reach it doesn't mean that it's not worth looking for.
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What you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.
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They all looked very much like the residents of any small valley to which you've never been.
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Everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best.
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Oh dear, all those words again," thought Milo as he climbed into the wagon with Tock and the cabinet members. "How are you going to make it move? It doesn't have a--" "Be very quiet," advised the duke, "for it goes without saying.
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Whether or not you find your own way, you're bound to find some way. If you happen to find my way, please return it, as it was lost years ago. I imagine by now it's quite rusty.
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You can't improve sound by having only silence. The problem is to use each at the proper time.
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Ah, this is fine," he cried triumphantly, holding up a small medallion on a chain. He dusted it off, and engraved on one side were the words "WHY NOT?" "That's a good reason for almost anything - a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable.
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Why, did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail?" "Where would you find a beaver that big?" grumbled the Humbug as his pencil point snapped. "I'm sure I don't know," he replied, "but if you did, you'd certainly know what to do with him.
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I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth
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Perhaps someday you can have one city as easy to see as Illusions and as hard to forget as Reality.
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AHA!" interrupted Officer Shrift, making another note in his little book. "Just as I thought: boys are the cause of everything.
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And that's why people no longer care which words they use as long as they use lots of them.
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There are no wrong roads to anywhere.
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Perhaps you'd care for a synonym bun," suggested the duke.
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To a child, and to an adult, too, what you discover by yourself, or what you think you discover by yourself, is what stays.
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The Mathemagician nodded knowingly and stroked his chin several times. “You’ll find,” he remarked gently, “that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort.
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Why not? That's a good reason for almost anything - a bit used perhaps, but still quite serviceable.
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Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?