The Phantom Tollbooth Quotes

for my sins, this is still me decades later:

Milo, lying down to sleep on a large page of sheet music

And Milo, full of thoughts and questions, curled up on the pages of tomorrow's music and eagerly awaited the dawn.

A tall conductor gesticulating

A large symphony

"What are they playing?" asked Tock

"The sunset, of course. They play it every evening, about this time. And they also play morning, noon, and night, when, of course, it's morning, noon, or night. Why, there wouldn't be any color in the world unless they played it.”

another absolutely lovely pair of sentences.

The sun was dropping slowly from sight, and stripes of purple and orange and crimson and gold piled themselves on top of the distant hills. The last shafts of light waited patiently for a flight of wrens to find their way home, and a group of anxious stars had already taken their places.

"Perhaps someday you can have one city as easy to see as Illusions and as hard to forget as Reality," Milo remarked.

"That will happen only when you bring back Rhyme and Reason," said Alec, smiling, for he had seen right through Milo's plans.

"Many years ago, on this very spot, there was a beautiful city of fine houses and inviting spaces, and no one who lived here was ever in a hurry. The streets were full of wonderful things to see and the people would often stop to look at them." "Didn't they have any place to go?" asked Milo. "To be sure," continued Alec; "but, as you know, 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. Then one day someone discovered that if you walked as fast as possible and looked at nothing but your shoes you would arrive at your destination much more quickly. Soon everyone was doing it. They all rushed down the avenues and hurried along the boulevards seeing nothing of the wonders and beauties of their city as they went." Milo remembered the many times he'd done the very same thing; and, as hard as he tried, there were even things on his own street that he couldn't remember.

"No one paid any attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at last a very strange thing began to happen. Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear. Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible. There was nothing to see at all." "What did they do?" the Humbug inquired, suddenly taking an interest in things. "Nothing at all," continued Alec. "They went right on living here just as they'd always done, in the houses they could no longer see and on the streets which had vanished, because nobody had noticed a thing. And that's the way they have lived to this very day." "Hasn't anyone told them?" asked Milo. "It doesn't do any good," Alec replied, "for they can never see what they're in too much of a hurry to look for."

The story of what happened to the city of Reason is too long to fit in a single post, but too good not to post. Feels like an apt metaphor.

Please read:

I feel like there is opportunity for some untapped social commentary here. Completely ordinary man invents false superlatives about himself so people will ask his opinion on things.

"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."

A perfectly ordinary-sized man standing in an open doorway, talking to Milo

“As you can see, though, I'm neither tall nor short nor fat nor thin. In fact, I'm quite ordinary, but there are so many ordinary men that no one asks their opinion about anything. Now what is your question?"

A perfectly normal looking man, standing in a doorway with a plaque above it reading “the thin man”

Just as they suspected, the other side of the house looked the same as the front, the back, and the side, and the door was again answered by a man who looked precisely like the other three.
"Are you the fattest thin man in the world?" asked Tock.
"Do you know one that's fatter?" he asked impatiently

A perfectly ordinary looking man, standing in a doorway with a plaque above it reading “the fat man”

"How nice of you to come by," exclaimed the man, who could have been the midget's twin brother.

"You must be the fat man," said Tock, learning not to count too much on appearance.

"The thinnest one in the world," he replied brightly.

A perfectly ordinary sized man, standing in a doorway with a plaque above it reading “the Midget”

They knocked at the door, whose name plate read "THE MIDGET"

"How are you?" inquired the man, who looked exactly like the giant.

"Are you the midget?" asked Tock again, with a hint of uncertainty in his voice.

"Unquestionably," he answered. "I'm the tallest midget in the world. May I help you?"

An ordinary man, answering a door that has a plaque above it reading “The Giant”

"Good afternoon," said the perfectly ordinary-sized man who answered the door.

"Are you the giant?" asked Tock doubtfully.

"To be sure," he replied proudly. "I'm the smallest giant in the world. What can I do for you?"

"Do you know where we are?" asked Milo.

"Certainly," he replied, "we're right here on this very spot. Besides, being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it's a matter of not knowing where you aren't—and I don't care at all about where I'm not."

All those posts will be lost in time, like tears in rain

such a lovely couple of sentences

The late-afternoon sunlight leaped lightly from leaf to leaf, slid along branches and down trunks, and dropped finally to the ground in warm, luminous patches. A soft glow filled the air with the kind of light that made everything look sharp and clear and close enough to reach out and touch.

“You 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.“

“It is quite important to know what lies behind things, and the family helps me take care of the rest. My father sees to things, my mother looks after things, my brother sees beyond things, my uncle sees the other side of every question, and my little sister Alice sees under things."

"I'm Alec Bings; I see through things. I can see whatever is inside, behind, around, covered by, or subsequent to anything else. In fact, the only thing I can't see is whatever happens to be right in front of my nose."

A boy hovering in the air, doing a little skip movement with his heels

"What a silly system." The boy laughed. "Then your head keeps changing its height and you always see things in a different way? Why, when you're fifteen things won't look at all the way they did when you were ten, and at twenty everything will change again."

Milo standing on the ground, while a boy of similar height hovers above him

"Isn't it beautiful?" gasped Milo.

"Oh, I don't know," answered a strange voice. "It's all in the way you look at things."

"I beg your pardon?" said Milo, for he didn't see who had spoken.

"I said it's all in how you look at things," repeated the voice.

Thought of the day:

“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 use them well and in the right places."

"In this box are all the words I know," he said. "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.”

“A very good question,” replied the king. “But there is one far more serious problem.”

“What is it?” asked Milo, who was rather unhappy at the turn the conversation had taken.

“I’m afraid I can tell you that only when you return,” cried the king, clapping his hands three times.

“I never realized it would be so simple,” said the king, stroking his beard and smiling broadly.

“Quite simple indeed,” concurred the bug.

“It sounds dangerous to me,” said Milo.

“Most dangerous, most dangerous,” mumbled the Humbug, still trying to be in agreement with everybody.

“Perhaps you might allow Rhyme and Reason to return,” said Milo softly.

“How nice that would be,” said Azaz, straightening up and adjusting his crown. “Even if they were a bother at times, things always went so well when they were here.”

Milo and Tock, in front of a glum-looking king, sitting on his throne with his chin resting on one fist.

“I don’t know which side of anything to look at,” protested Milo. “Everything is so confusing and all your words only make things worse.”

“How true,” said the unhappy king, resting his regal chin on his royal fist as he thought fondly of the old days. “There must be something we can do about it.”