Tollbooth Quotes

Just follow that line forever," said the Mathemagician, "and when you reach the end, turn left. There you'll find the land of Infinity, where the tallest, the shortest, the biggest, the smallest, and the most and least of everything are kept."
"I don't have that much time," said Milo anxiously. "isn't there a quicker way?"
"Well, you might try this flight of stairs," he suggested, opening another door and pointing up."It goes there, too. ~ Norton Juster

That's what improvising is like for me. There's no tollbooth between my impulse and my action. ~ Twyla Tharp

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. ~ Norton Juster

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

If my years have taught me anything, it's
this: there are many roads to God
and all men and women
have a right to choose their own.
And yet...there are those who want to set
a tollbooth at every junction, demanding
that you pay and pay and pay,
that you walk only on the road they have walked,
the only one they say is open. ~ Jennifer Fisher Bryant

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

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. ~ Norton Juster

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

And then, with a shock like high-voltage coursing through me, the phone beside me started pealing thinly.

I just stood there and stared at it, blood draining from my face. A call to a tollbooth? It must, it must be a wrong number, somebody wanted the Information Booth or-! It must have been audible outside, with all I had the slide partly closed. One of the redcaps passing by turned, looked over, then started coming across toward where I was. To get rid of him I picked up the receiver, put it to my ear.

'You'd better come out now, time's up,' a flat, deadly voice said. 'They're calling your train, but you're not getting on that one - or any other.'

'Wh-where are talking from?'

'The next booth to yours,' the voice jeered. 'You forgot the glass inserts only reach halfway down.'

The connection broke and a man's looming figure was shadowing the glass in front of my eyes, before I could even get the receiver back on the hook. I dropped it full-length, tensed my right arm to pound it through his face as soon as I shoved the glass aside. He had a revolver-bore for a top vest-button, trained on me. Two more had shown up behind him, from which direction I hadn't noticed. It was very dark in the booth now, their collective silhouettes shut out all the daylight. The station and all its friendly bustle was blotted out, had receded into the far background, a thousand miles away for all the help it could give me. I slapped the glass ~ Cornell Woolrich

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

I won't tell," he said, his arms holding my waist with amateur stiffness. I smiled, thinking about the lover he'd become and all the things he'd try with me for the very first time. I'd be the sexual yardstick for his whole life: Jack would spend the rest of his days trying but failing to relive the experience of being given everything at a time when he knew nothing. Like a tollbooth in his memory, every partner he'd have afterwards would have to pass through the gate of my comparison, and it would be a losing equation. The numbers could never be as favorable as they were right now, when his naivety would be subtracted from my experience to produce the largest sum of astonishment possible. ~ Alissa Nutting

Isn't this everyone's Point of View?" asked Tock, looking around curiously.
"Of course not," replied Alec, sitting himself down on nothing. "It's only mine, and you certainly can't always look at things from someone else's Point of View. For instance, from here that looks like a bucket of water," he said, pointing to a bucket of water; "but from an ant's point of view it's a vast ocean, from an elephant's just a cool drink, and to a fish, of course, it's home. So, you see, the way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from. ~ Norton Juster

It's bad enough wasting time without killing it. ~ Norton Juster

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. ~ Norton Juster

The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that. ~ Norton Juster

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

There is much worth noticing that often escapes the eye. ~ Norton Juster

What a strange thing to have happen," he thought (just as you must be thinking right now). "This game is much more serious than I thought, for here I am riding on a road I've never seen, going to a place I've never heard of, and all because of a tollbooth which came from nowhere. I'm certainly glad that it's a nice day for a trip," he concluded hopefully, for, at the moment, this was the one thing he definitely knew. ~ Norton Juster

Things which are equally bad are also equally good. Try to look at the bright side of things.
- Humbug ~ Norton Juster

Maybe all wondrous books appear in our lives the way Milo's tollbooth appears, an inexplicable gift, cast up by some curious chance that comes to feel, after we have finished and fallen in love with the book, like the workings of a secret purpose. Of all the enchantments of beloved books the most mysterious-the most phantasmal-is the way they always seem to come our way precisely when we need them. ~ Michael Chabon