DAY 9: MY FAVORITE QUOTES FROM THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH

I know I would never be able to come across this great and enormously influential (personally speaking) novel if it were not because of a dear friend who was generous enough to send me an ebook version of The Phantom Tollbooth earlier this year (indeed, thank you, Cath!). Curiously, I was made into one of its lucky readers and fans exactly half a century after the book was first published. See, it is never too late to discover wonderful things.

For me, The Phantom Tollbooth is all about appreciation of the world around us and knowing what really matters in life. Anyone would surely love and enjoy the allegories and the jokes peppered throughout the novel. Also, following the story of Milo and his trusted friend Tock as they make a tour from Doldrums to the Forest of Sight to the Valley of Sound and up to the Castle in the Air, meeting new friends and valuable experiences along the way, is like traveling to one's own enlightenment. This is truly a must-read for children of all ages.

I don't have a thorough review of the book. But what I have below is a list of my favorite The Phantom Tollbooth quotes.


"What you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do." -- Princess of Pure Reason

"So many things are possible as long as you don't know they're impossible." -- King Azaz, Mathemagician

"Think of all the trouble it saves ... If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing...." -- Trivium, on being a monster of habit.

"You must never feel badly about doing 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." -- Princess of Pure Reason

"...But it's not just learning things that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters." -- Princess of Sweet Rhyme

"Whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes around the world; when a speck of dust falls to the ground, the entire planet weighs a little more; and when you stomp your foot, the earth moves slightly off its course. Whenever you laugh, gladness spreads like ripples in a pond; and whenever you're sad, no one anywhere can be really happy. And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer. And remember also that many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But someday you'll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow." -- Princess of Sweet Rhyme

"...There's a lot to see everywhere, if only you keep your eyes open." -- Alec Bings

"A sound which is not heard disappears forever and is not to be found again." -- writer, one of the marchers at the Valley of Sound

"A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect." -- Humbug

"While it is wrong to use too few (words), it is often far worse to use too many." -- Faintly Macabre

"You see the way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from." -- Alec Bings

"Being lost is never a matter of not knowing where you are; it is a matter of not knowing where you aren't." -- Alec Bings


(Image from here)