Life & Wisdom Quote by Chris Van Allsburg

Van Allsburg’s line lands like a sigh disguised as a joke: the wish is vivid, almost childlike, but it’s delivered with the adult’s shrug of disbelief. The tooth fairy isn’t just a cute myth here; it’s a stand-in for every private hope we keep on a shelf even after we’ve learned how the world works. The sentence performs that split in real time. “As much as I’d like” opens the door to longing, then “I don’t really believe” quietly shuts it, not with cynicism but with practiced restraint.

What makes it work is the specificity of the image: “an evening walk.” That detail domesticates the supernatural. He’s not asking for a grand revelation, just a casual brush with wonder between dinner and bedtime. It’s a very Van Allsburg move: the uncanny sidling up to the everyday, the way his stories often let magic appear at the edge of ordinary life without announcing itself.

The subtext is about permission. Children don’t need permission to believe; adults do, and they rarely get it. By admitting the desire while insisting on disbelief, he gives readers a socially acceptable way to confess their own yearning for enchantment. It’s also a tidy little commentary on modern adulthood: we’re trained to treat wonder as embarrassing, yet we still take walks at dusk hoping something improbable might step out of the trees.

Contextually, coming from an author who built a career on “maybe” worlds (The Polar Express, Jumanji), it reads like a credo: skepticism can be sensible, but imagination is still a legitimate appetite.