E. L. Konigsburg Quotes

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.

The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you. It's the same as going on a vacation. Some people spend all their time on a vacation taking pictures so that when they get home they can show their friends evidence that they had a good time. They don't pause to let the vacation enter inside of them and take that home.

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

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

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

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

Often the search proves more profitable than the goal.

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.

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

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

Indecisiveness wears a person out.

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

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

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

Sometimes we even have to risk making fools of ourselves.

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.

Sometimes silence is a habit that hurts?

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

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.

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.

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

When I visit schools and talk to students about writing, I give them one word of advice and I give it to them quickly and loudly-FINISH! Starting something is easier than finishing it. You must have discipline to go from a few sentences, to a few paragraphs, to a piece of writing that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Finishing something bridges the difference between someone who has talent and one who does not. My best advice? Apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair-and finish. FINISH!

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.

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

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