Norton Juster Quotes - Page 4

But I find the best things I do, I do when I'm trying to avoid doing something else I'm supposed to be doing. You know, you're working on something. You get bugged, or you lose your enthusiasm or something. So you turn to something else with an absolute vengeance

...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.

Perhaps you'd care for a synonym bun," suggested the duke.

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?

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.

And some looked even more like each other than they did like themselves.

People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I've never heard of

And that's why people no longer care which words they use as long as they use lots of them.

They walked for a while, all silent in their thoughts, until they reached the car and Alec drew a fine telescope from his shirt and handed it to Milo. "Carry this with you on your journey," he said softly, "for there is much worth noticing that often escapes the eye. Through it you can see everything from the tender moss in a sidewalk crack to the glow of the farthest star — and, most important of all, you can see things as they really are, not just as they seem to be. It's my gift to you.

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. Milo thought this was quite the wisest thing he'd heard all day.

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.

You must never feel badly about making mistakes.

Just because you have a choice, it doesn't mean that any of them 'has' to be right.

Many of the things which can never be, often are.

...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.

When you're very young and you learn something - a fact, a piece of information, whatever - it doesn't connect to anything.

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.

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.

It has been a long trip," said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat; "but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn't made so many mistakes. I'm afraid it's all my fault.

Infinity is a dreadfully poor place. They can never manage to make ends meet.

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

Where is the sound?" someone hastily scribbled on the blackboard, and they all waited anxiously for the reply. Milo caught his breath, picked up the chalk, and explained simply, "It's on the tip of my tongue.

To a child, and to an adult, too, what you discover by yourself, or what you think you discover by yourself, is what stays.