Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth” Quotes (21 Quotes)

A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.

So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.

Everybody is so terribly sensitive about the things they know best.

There are no wrong roads to anywhere.

Expect everything so that nothing comes unexpected.

They all looked very much like the residents of any small valley to which you've never been.

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

Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.

Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going.

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don't care if they make sense or nonsense.

Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?

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.

I don't know of any wrong road to Dictionopolis, so if this road goes to Dictionopolis at all it must be the right road, and if it doesn't it must be the right road to somewhere else, because there are no wrong roads to anywhere. Do you think it will rain?

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and not get wet.

I know one thing for certain; it is much harder to tell whether you are lost than whether you were lost, for, on many occasions, where you are going is exactly where you are. On the other hand, if you often find that where you've been is not at all where you should have gone, and, since it's much more difficult to find your way back from someplace you've never left, I suggest you go there immediately and then decide.

You can't improve sound by having only silence. The problem is to use each at the proper time.

In this box are all the words I know…Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is to use them well and in the right places.

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.

It's bad enough wasting time without killing it.

You see. . . it's really quite strenuous doing nothing all day, so once a week we take a holiday and go nowhere, which was just where we were going when you came along. Would you care to join us?

Since you got here by not thinking, it seems reasonable to expect that, in order to get out, you must thinking.