Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults. That's what happened to me. Once upon a time, I was a boy named Hugo Cabret, and I desperately believed that a broken automaton would save my life. Now that my cocoon has fallen away and I have emerged as a magician named Professor Alcofrisbas, I can look back and see that I was right. The automaton my father discovered did save me. But now I have built a new automaton. I spent countless hours designing it. I made every gear myself, carefully cut every brass disk, and fashioned every bt of machinery with my own hands. When you wind it up, it can do something I'm sure no other automaton in the world can do. It can tel you the incredible story of Georges Melies, his wife, their goddaughter, and a beloved clock maker whose son grew up to be a magician. The complicated machinery inside my automaton can produce one-hundred and fifty-eight different pictures, and it can wrote, letter, by letter, an entire book, twenty-six thousand one hundred and fifty-nine words. These words. THE END . Brian Selznick
About This Quote

The end of a story is always a sad one, but the end of a story that has been told in a book or movie can be even more sad. Movies and books are often about an adventure that makes the reader or viewer remember the time they lived through, and the journey it took them on, and how it ended. But sometimes, because of what happens at the end, people remember not the adventure itself but the time from which it came. They don't want to live through any more adventures because they have been through so much already.

This is what happens to Professor Alcofrisbas after he builds his automaton. He winds it up and shows it to a man who tells him a story about Georges Melies, his wife, their goddaughter, and a beloved clock maker whose son grew up to be a magician. He looks back on what he has done and remembers how he used his automaton as Georges Melies' magic lantern to show Georges Melies' son (his own son) how he built his automaton.

The complicated machinery inside his automaton can produce one-hundred and fifty-eight different pictures, and it can wrote, letter, by letter, an entire book: twenty-six thousand one hundred and fifty-nine words. The end of an adventure that has been told in a book or movie.

Source: The Invention Of Hugo Cabret

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