Quotes from E.L. Konigsburg

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.

should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow.

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.

Angel became part of Claudia's story about finding herself, about how the greatest adventure lies not in running away but in looking inside, and the greatest discovery is not in finding out who made a statue but in finding out what makes you.

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.

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

Jake knew that his mother had a tendency to mistake rules, her rules, for principles. She did not bend because she did not have enough confidence to know when or how far. She did not listen well because one ear was always otherwise engaged - either listening to what she herself had just said or what she would say next.

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

I prefer not to.

In some way, every creative action disturbs the universe.

A happy person strikes a balance between doing good and doing well.

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.

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.

Next to any kind of elegance, Claudia loved good clean smells.

During her lifetime Eleanor of Aquitaine had not been a patient woman. While she had lived, she had learned to bide her time, but biding one's time is a very different thing from patience.

Since language is the only tool with which writers can reflect and shape a culture, it must be transformed into art. Language is not a limitation on the art of literature; it is a glorification. It has been the scaffolding inside which nations and philosophies have been built, and the language of literature has added the ornamental pediment by which the culture is remembered.

I am truly anxious to get on with my life.

Ninety percent of who you are is invisible.

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

Parke-Bernet Galleries.

Something made me pull sounds out of my silence...

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

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

Tell how it is normal to be very comfortable on the outside but very uncomfortable on the inside. Tell how funny it all is. But tell a little something else, too. What can it hurt? Tell a little something else--about how you can be a nonconformist and about how you can be an outsider. And tell how you are entitled to a little privacy. But for goodness' sake, say all that very softly.