Parenting & Family Quote by Norton Juster

Anyone who has ever tried to sneak a different bedtime story onto the rota will recognize the quiet dread inside Juster’s line: children don’t just enjoy a book, they annex it. The joke lands because it’s framed as a “problem,” as if the real crisis is not the adult’s fatigue but the child’s insistence that meaning isn’t a one-time transaction. Once they love something, they don’t move on like polite consumers. They circle it, worry it, demand its return.

Juster, best known for The Phantom Tollbooth, understood repetition as a kind of devotion. Kids aren’t asking for the same performance because they lack imagination; they’re stress-testing the story for reliability. They want the exact cadence, the familiar turn of phrase, the moment they can anticipate and still feel. That “a hundred times” is hyperbole with a parent’s honesty: repetition becomes both bonding ritual and endurance sport, exposing the strange labor of love in caregiving. You’re not just reading; you’re becoming the soundtrack to a child’s private mythology.

The architect detail sharpens the subtext. Architects think in structures you inhabit again and again, not disposable impressions. A favorite book becomes a room a child keeps re-entering, checking that the walls are still where they were, noticing new corners as they grow. The line gently punctures adult notions of novelty as sophistication. Kids teach a more radical literacy: return, repeat, deepen.