Norton Juster Quotes

Where ever I am I always find myself looking out the window wishing I was somewhere else.

It doesn't matter what I'm doing - I wish it was something else. If I'm producing, I wish I was directing. If I'm directing, I wish I was doing almost anything else!

There are times when you wish you were somewhere else, and someone else.

I was always a 'grass is greener' kind of guy.

The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

There's always this thing of wanting to be elsewhere.

The whole society depends on creating ambition in you. Ambition means a conflict, ambition means that whatsoever you are, you are wrong - you have to be somewhere else. Wherever you are, you are wrong - you have to be somewhere else. A constant madness to be somewhere else, to be somebody else, is what ambition is.

I wasn't unhappy, but I was a little like: 'Is this it? Really?' I was thirsty.

I've always had this deep and chronic sense of dissatisfaction.

I always say I was born too late in the world, too old.

The more I get used to my life, the more restless I become.

So much of my intention with songs is to voice a continual dissatisfaction, or at least to claw my way out of it.

I never want to be satisfied.

I'm never content, and I don't know if that's a curse or a good thing.

I hate not playing. That's the bottom line.

Was there another life she was meant to be living? At times she felt a keen certainty that there was ― a phantom life, taunting her from just out of reach. A sense would come over her while she was drawing or walking, and once while she was dancing slow and close with Kaz, that she was supposed to be doing something else with her hands, with her legs, with her body. Something else. Something else. Something else.

The malcontent is neither well, full nor fasting; and though he abounds with complaints, yet nothing dislikes him but the present; for what he condemns while it was, once passed, he magnifies and strives to recall it out of the jaw of time. What he hath he seeth not, his eyes are so taken up with what he wants; and what he sees he careth not for, because be cares so much for that which is not.

In all climates, under all skies, man's happiness is always somewhere else.

The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.' Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.

Stress is caused by being 'here' but wanting to be 'there'.

Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

No one is ever satisfied where he is.