95 Quotes by E.L. Konigsburg

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

Can you know excellence if you’ve never seen it? Can you know good if you have seen only bad?

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.