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The Child
The Terrible Trivium is the first demon Milo and his friends encounter in the Mountains of Ignorance, though he doesn’t initially look like a demon. Rather, he looks like a well-dressed man—but one without a face or any features. He holds up Milo, Tock, and the Humbug by assigning them tasks that will take years to complete, such as digging a hole with a needle. His entire purpose in life is to distract people with pointless tasks like this and keep them from getting anything meaningful done. Milo discovers that the way to beat the Trivium is to use math and his magic staff to calculate how long these pointless tasks will take—that, the novel suggests, will impress upon people how much time they could be spending on tasks that aren’t pointless.
Terrible Trivium Quotes in The Phantom Tollbooth
The The Phantom Tollbooth quotes below are all either spoken by Terrible Trivium or refer to Terrible Trivium. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 17. Unwelcoming Committee
Quotes
“But why do only unimportant things?” asked Milo, who suddenly remembered how much time he spent each day doing them.
“Think of all the trouble it saves,” the man explained, and his face looked as if he’d be grinning an evil grin—if he could grin at all. “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 should really be doing, and if it weren’t for that dreadful magic staff, you’d never know how much time you were wasting.”
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Terrible Trivium Quotes in The Phantom Tollbooth
The The Phantom Tollbooth quotes below are all either spoken by Terrible Trivium or refer to Terrible Trivium. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 17. Unwelcoming Committee
Quotes
“But why do only unimportant things?” asked Milo, who suddenly remembered how much time he spent each day doing them.
“Think of all the trouble it saves,” the man explained, and his face looked as if he’d be grinning an evil grin—if he could grin at all. “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 should really be doing, and if it weren’t for that dreadful magic staff, you’d never know how much time you were wasting.”
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
