Norton Juster Quotes
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I am the Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit.
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The only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort.
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If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself.
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Many of the things which can never be, often are.
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A good book written for children can be read by adults
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A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.
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Is everyone who lives in Ignorance like you?" asked Milo. "Much worse," he said longingly. "But I don't live here. I'm from a place very far away called Context.
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You must never feel badly about making mistakes ... 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.
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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.
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if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.
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...it's not just learning that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things that matters.
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I write best in the morning, and I can only write for about half a day, that's about it.
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Since you got here by not thinking, it seems reasonable to expect that, in order to get out, you must start thinking.
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The way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.
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...it's just as bad to live in a place where what you do see isn't there as it is to live in one where what you don't see is.
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The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way.
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And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer.
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Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven't the answer to a question you've been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause in a roomful of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you're all alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful, if you listen carefully.
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And some looked even more like each other than they did like themselves.
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Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.
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One of the problems you have when you read with kids is that once they like something they want you to read it a hundred times.
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Why, can you imagine what would happen if we named all the twos Henry or George or Robert or John or lots of other things? You'd have to say Robert plus John equals four, and if the four's name were Albert, things would be hopeless.
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What you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.
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There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.