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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

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Norton Juster
Age: 91 †
Born: 1929
Born: June 2
Died: 2021
Died: March 8
Architect
Author
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Cities
Grants
Started
Received
Experience
Kept
Write
Putting
Phantom
Kids
Perception
Phantoms
Book
Foundation
Ford
Writing
Became
Grant
People
Instead
Urban

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Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.
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Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going.
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...it's not just learning that's important. It's learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things that matters.
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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.
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You see, it's really quite simple. A simile is just a mode of comparison employing 'as' and 'like' to reveal the hidden character or essence of whatever we want to describe, and through the use of fancy, association, contrast, extension, or imagination, to enlarge our understanding or perception of human experience and observation.
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Why, can you imagine what would happen if we named all the twos Henry or George or Robert or John or lots of other things? You'd have to say Robert plus John equals four, and if the four's name were Albert, things would be hopeless.
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But I suppose there's a lot to see everywhere, if only you keep your eyes open.
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Have you ever heard a blindfolded octopus unwrap a cellophane-covered bathtub?
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There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.
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The way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.
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Just as I thought: boys are the cause of everything.
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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?
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Infinity is a dreadfully poor place. They can never manage to make ends meet.
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What you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do.
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And some looked even more like each other than they did like themselves.
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He paused again as a tear of longing rolled from cheek to lip with the sweet-salty taste of an old memory.
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