Top 80 E.L. Konigsburg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Before you can be anything, you have to be yourself. That’s the hardest thing to find.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

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

— E.L. Konigsburg

4. “Five minutes of planning are worth fifteen minutes of just looking.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

5. “True simplicity is elegant.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

6. “Indecisiveness wears a person out.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

7. “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

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

— E.L. Konigsburg

9. “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

10. “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

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

— E.L. Konigsburg

12. “Often the search proves more profitable than the goal.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

13. “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

14. “Biding one’s time is a very different thing from patience.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

15. “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

16. “I’ve been the oldest child since before you were born.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

17. “Sometimes silence is a habit that hurts?”

— E.L. Konigsburg

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

— E.L. Konigsburg

19. “Silence does for thinking what a suspension bridge does for space – it makes connections.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

20. “Going to school- picking an apple Getting an education- eating it.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

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

— E.L. Konigsburg

22. “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

23. “Sometimes we even have to risk making fools of ourselves.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

29. “How dare he fall in love with his own wife! -Salai.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

30. “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

31. “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

32. “There were times in school when a person had to do things fast, cheap, and without character.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

33. “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

34. “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.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

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

— E.L. Konigsburg

36. “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.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

37. “There’s something nice and safe about having money.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

38. “I keep telling you that often the search proves more profitable than the goal.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

39. “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

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

— E.L. Konigsburg

41. “Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her pack. She didn’t like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

42. “Jamie liked perspiration, a little bit of dirt, and complications.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

43. “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

44. “I chose a brunette, a redhead, a blond, and a kid with hair as black as print on paper.”

— E.L. Konigsburg

45. “Something made me pull sounds out of my silence...”

— E.L. Konigsburg

46. “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

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

— E.L. Konigsburg

49. “Can you know excellence if you’ve never seen it? Can you know good if you have seen only bad?”

— E.L. Konigsburg

50. “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