E.l. Konigsburg Quotes

#1. When I was 6, a family friend gave me E.L. Konigsburg's 'A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver' and launched me on a full-blown Eleanor obsession. I wanted to ride off on Crusade, to launch a thousand troubadour songs, to marry a king - and then jilt him and marry another.

Lauren Willig

#2. Oh, well,' Mrs. Zender continued, 'Mother always said that Mr. Zender had other talents. He was good looking, and I think Mother put looking good right up there with the harpsichord, an instrument that has limited performance time and requires a great deal of maintenance.

E.L. Konigsburg

#3. Ninety percent of who you are is invisible. - Mrs. Zender

E.L. Konigsburg

#4. Jamie, when the stakes are high, I never cheat. I consider myself too important to do that.

E.L. Konigsburg

#5. Julian Singh, he said, extending his hand. No one (a) introduces himself and then (b) extends his hand to be shaken while (c) wearing shorts and (d) knee socks and (e) holding a genuine leather book bag on (f) the first day of school.

E.L. Konigsburg

#6. If you think of doing something in New York City, you can be certain that at least two thousand other people have the same thought. And of the two thousand who do, about one thousand will be standing in line waiting to do it.

E.L. Konigsburg

#7. My face is something between groteque and beautiful, Salai. It is something far less interesting; it is plain.

E.L. Konigsburg

#8. Flattery is as important a machine as the lever, isn't it, Saxonberg? Give it a proper place to rest, and it can move the world.

E.L. Konigsburg

#9. Finish. The difference between being a writer and being a person of talent is the discipline it takes to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and finish. Don't talk about doing it. Do it. Finish.

E.L. Konigsburg

#10. Biding one's time is a very different thing from patience.

E.L. Konigsburg

#11. Jamie: The only kind of deal that I can make is with money, and we haven't got any of that.
Mrs. Frankweiler: You are very poor indeed if that is the only kind of deal you can make

E.L. Konigsburg

#12. Every now and then, a person must do something simply because he wants to, because it seems to him worth doing. And that does not make it worthless or a waste of time.

E.L. Konigsburg

#13. Kids want acceptance from their peers, but in two different, opposing ways: They want to be like everyone else and they want to be different from everyone else. So the question is: How do you reconcile these opposing longings?

E.L. Konigsburg

#14. There were times in school when a person had to do things fast, cheap, and without character.

E.L. Konigsburg

#15. They are saying that if life has a structure, a staff, a sensible scaffold, we hang our nonsense on it. And they are saying that broken parts add color and music to the staff of life.

E.L. Konigsburg

#16. But no one was prouder of me or happier for me than Branwell, and I think he would not have been prouder or happier if he had won himself. And I don't know anyone anywhere who has a friend like that.

E.L. Konigsburg

#17. Even after more than five hundred years in Heaven, Eleanor of Aquitaine still missed quarreling and dressing up. Eleanor missed strong, sweet smells. Eleanor missed feeling hot and being cold. Eleanor missed Henry. She missed life.

E.L. Konigsburg

#18. There's something nice and safe about having money.

E.L. Konigsburg

#19. But lying in bed just before going to sleep is the worst time for organized thinking; it is the best time for free thinking. Ideas drift like clouds in an undecided breeze, taking first this direction and then that.

E.L. Konigsburg

#20. Branwell told a cruel lie in silence.

E.L. Konigsburg

#21. Good explanations are like bathing suits, darling; they are meant to reveal everything by covering only what is necessary.

E.L. Konigsburg

#22. Five minutes of planning are worth fifteen minutes of just looking.

E.L. Konigsburg

#23. Going to school- picking an apple Getting an education- eating it

E.L. Konigsburg

#24. When you hug someone, you learn something else about them. An important something else.

E.L. Konigsburg

#25. Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up and touch everything. If you never let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you.

E.L. Konigsburg

#26. If you really want to be a witch, nothing you have to do will seem like too much. If you don't really want to be a witch, everything will seem like too much.

E.L. Konigsburg

#27. I am convinced that not only do children need children's books to fine-tune their brains, but our civilization needs them if we are not going to unplug ourselves from our collective past.

E.L. Konigsburg

#28. Because after a time having a secret and nobody knowing you have a secret is no fun. And although you don't want others to know what the secret is, you want them to at least know you have one.

E.L. Konigsburg

#29. Sixth graders had stopped asking "Now what?" and had started asking "So what?" She had not been sorry to retire when she did.

E.L. Konigsburg

#30. Just because I don't have on a silly black costume and carry a silly broom and wear a silly black hat, doesn't mean that I'm not a witch. I'm a witch all the time and not just on Halloween.

E.L. Konigsburg

#31. Sometimes we even have to risk making fools of ourselves.

E.L. Konigsburg

#32. I was born in New York City. But my family moved when I was still an infant. Except for a year and half when we lived in Youngstown, Ohio, I grew up in small towns in Pennsylvania. I graduated from high school in Farrell, Pennsylvania.

E.L. Konigsburg

#33. I am truly anxious to get on with my life.

E.L. Konigsburg

#34. I waited for her to catch up, and when I did, she slowed down, and I missed seeing the light in her hair. I never told Nadia how much I liked seeing the halo the sunlight made of her hair. Sometimes silence is a habit that hurts.

E.L. Konigsburg

#35. But happiness is not always loud and bright and crowded. Happiness ripens like a watermelon, sweet and rosy on the inside with only a thin top layer altogether free of small black pits. And, like a watermelon, the whole thing can be covered with a plain dark rind.

E.L. Konigsburg

#36. Let me first talk about our brains as a personal radio telescope. Let me talk first about its wonderful built-in wiring for tuning out the static of our civilization in order to better tune in its symphony.

E.L. Konigsburg

#37. Friendship is a combination of art and craft. The craft part is in knowing how to give and how to take. The art part is in knowing when, and the whole process only works when no one is keeping track.

E.L. Konigsburg

#38. Jamie, you know, you could go clear around the world and still come home wondering if the tuna fish sandwiches at Chock Full O'Nuts still cost thirty-five cents.

E.L. Konigsburg

#39. I chose a brunette, a redhead, a blond, and a kid with hair as black as print on paper.

E.L. Konigsburg

#40. Inside me there was a lot of best friendship that no one but Ginger was using.

E.L. Konigsburg

#41. Before you can be anything, you have to be yourself. That's the hardest thing to find.

E.L. Konigsburg

#42. It is sometimes necessary to use unnecessary words like thank you and please just to make life prettier.

E.L. Konigsburg

#43. I don't think there is any feeling I like more than the one that someone is glad to see me.
- Connor Kane

E.L. Konigsburg

#44. I get ideas for my books from people I know and what happens to them, from places I've been and what happens to me, and from things I read.

E.L. Konigsburg

#45. The storm in our private lives had picked him up and put him out of place. Me, too. I, too, had been picked up from one place and set down in another. I, too, had been stranded. We both needed help resettling.

E.L. Konigsburg

#46. Both Jamie and Claudia had acquired a talent for being near but never part of a group. (Some people, Saxonberg, never learn to do that all their lives, and some learn it all too well.)

E.L. Konigsburg

#47. A nasty letter or a sarcastic one can make you righteously angry, but what can you do about a polite letter of rejection? Nothing, really, except cry.

E.L. Konigsburg

#48. She was bored with simply being straight-A's Claudia Kincaid. She was tired of arguing about whose turn it was to choose the Sunday night seven-thirty television show, of injustice, and of the monotony of everything.

E.L. Konigsburg

#49. ...I didn't run away to come home the same. -Claudia

E.L. Konigsburg

#50. There were times when the bad and the sad could have weighed me down. But to drink life from only the good is to taste only half of it.

E.L. Konigsburg

#51. Characters are so important to a story that they actually decide where the story is going. When I write, I know my characters. I know how things are going to end, and I know some important incidents along the way.

E.L. Konigsburg

#52. Can you know excellence if you've never seen it? Can you know good if you have seen only bad?

E.L. Konigsburg

#53. For the novelist or poet, for the scientist or artist, the question is not where do ideas come from, the question is how they come. The how is the mystery. The how is fragile.

E.L. Konigsburg

#54. Growing up in a small town gives you two things: a sense of place and a feeling of self-consciousness - self-consciousness about one's education and exposure, both of which tend to be limited. On the other hand, limited possibilities also mean creating your own options.

E.L. Konigsburg

#55. She thanked me again and then said, 'Some people say 'God is in the details.' Others say it's the Devil.' Margaret replied, 'Maybe it depends on who's reporting the details.

E.L. Konigsburg

#56. Peter took a deep breath. 'Really, Mother! Anyone who blows pink bubble in front of a Picasso Blue painting should be arrested.

E.L. Konigsburg

#57. Mrs. Olinski was the first teacher Epiphany ever had who taught from a wheelchair.

E.L. Konigsburg

#58. Talk was like the vitamins of our friendship: Large daily doses kept it healthy.

E.L. Konigsburg

#59. Silence does for thinking what a suspension bridge does for space
it makes connections.

E.L. Konigsburg

#60. Never have a long conversation with anyone who says between you and I.

E.L. Konigsburg

#61. Because way down deep they know that civilized people have to preserve rare birds.

E.L. Konigsburg

#62. Readers let me know that they like books that have more to them than meets the eye. Had they not let me know that, I never would have written 'The View From Saturday.'

E.L. Konigsburg

#63. It often takes more courage to be a passenger than a driver.

E.L. Konigsburg

#64. I'm not sure that love and like aren't like cats and dogs: One can't grow up to be the other, but they can be taught to live under the same roof.

E.L. Konigsburg

#65. I've been the oldest child since before you were born

E.L. Konigsburg

#66. Sometimes it takes more courage to be the passenger than to be the driver.

E.L. Konigsburg

#67. The essential problems remain the same ... The kids I write about are asking for the same things I wanted. They want two contradictory things. They want to be the same as everyone else, and they want to be different from everyone else. They want acceptance for both.

E.L. Konigsburg

#68. Whenever someone makes out a guest list, the people not on it become officially uninvited, and that makes them the enemies of the invited. Guest lists are just a way of choosing sides.

E.L. Konigsburg

#69. A good lawyer never asks a witness a question she doesn't know the answer to.' 'But, Margaret, I'm not trying to be a good lawyer. I'm trying to be a good friend.

E.L. Konigsburg

#70. Having words and explanations for things is too modern

E.L. Konigsburg

#71. Art comes from a visceral need and is usually generated by something I have seen; writing comes from something that happens in my head and my heart.

E.L. Konigsburg

#72. Jamie liked perspiration, a little bit of dirt, and complications.

E.L. Konigsburg

#73. Uncle had learned long ago that obeying a rule in fact but not in spirit was very hard on people who say we for I and who do not allow dogs on their premises.

E.L. Konigsburg

#74. After I won the Newbery Medal for 'From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,' children all over the world let me know that they liked books that take them to unusual places where they meet unusual people.

E.L. Konigsburg

#75. Loved him beyond reason, but then, all love is beyond reason.

E.L. Konigsburg

#76. Every job in the world has some built-in boredom. No man can stay excited about something every minute he is doing it. Routine is as necessary to life as water is to beer; it is the base that holds the flavors and spices together.

E.L. Konigsburg

#77. How dare he fall in love with his own wife! -Salai

E.L. Konigsburg

#78. Nathan, how can you stand playing the same piece over and over again?" And Grandpa Nate answered, "Why don't you ask me how I can stand making love to the same woman over and over again?

E.L. Konigsburg

#79. Parke-Bernet Galleries.

E.L. Konigsburg

#80. How can you know what is missing if you've never met it? You must know of something's existence before you can notice its absence.

E.L. Konigsburg

#81. He learned to read the ocean by a cupful. He also learned to regard each port of call as part of the journey and not as the destination. Every voyage begins when you do.

E.L. Konigsburg

#82. The eyes are the windows of the soul ... If someone was to look into your eyes, what would you want them to see?

E.L. Konigsburg

#83. By the time they get to 6th grade honor roll students won't risk making a mistake, and sometimes to be successful, you have to risk making mistakes.

E.L. Konigsburg

#84. True simplicity is elegant.

E.L. Konigsburg

#85. In some way, every creative action disturbs the universe.

E.L. Konigsburg

#86. Indecisiveness wears a person out.

E.L. Konigsburg

#87. After Margaret moved to Florida they continued to stay in touch in a Christmas card/life-milestone way.

E.L. Konigsburg

#88. Often the search proves more profitable than the goal.

E.L. Konigsburg

#89. Secrets are the kind of adventure she needs. Secrets are safe, and they do much to make you different. On the inside where it counts.

E.L. Konigsburg

#90. Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.

E.L. Konigsburg

#91. Jennifer," I asked, "what do you ever do besides read?"
She looked up at the sky and sighed and said very seriously, "I think.

E.L. Konigsburg

#92. We'll walk from here to the

E.L. Konigsburg

#93. Friendship depends on interlocking time, place, and state of mind.

E.L. Konigsburg

#94. It takes more courage to disturb the neighborhood than it takes to disturb the universe. And the price is often higher.

E.L. Konigsburg

#95. I believe in courtesy. It is the way we avoid hurting people's feelings. She thought that maybe, just maybe, western civilization was in decline because people did not take time to take tea at four o'clock.

E.L. Konigsburg

#96. I think most of us are outsiders. And I think that's good because it makes you question things.

E.L. Konigsburg

#97. I made myself a glass of chocolate milk using enough syrup for three normal glasses. I also made myself four peanut butter crackers. Then I walked out the living room door to our terrace. The trees were coming! New green was all over ... green so new that it was kissing yellow.

E.L. Konigsburg

#98. I prefer not to.

E.L. Konigsburg

#99. I want all the books on the shelves.
I want the books with dinosaur words like nigger that show the skeletons in our national closet. I want books with the word cunt as well as the word kike. Words don't scare me. Suppressing them does.

E.L. Konigsburg