“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, quote from The View from Saturday
“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, quote from The View from Saturday
“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, quote from The View from Saturday
“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, quote from The View from Saturday
“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, quote from The View from Saturday
“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, quote from The View from Saturday
“Sometimes we even have to risk making fools of ourselves.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, quote from The View from Saturday
“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, quote from The View from Saturday
“The way I see it, the difference between farmers and suburbanites is the difference in the way we feel about dirt. To them, the earth is something to be respected and preserved, but dirt gets no respect. A farmer likes dirt. Suburbanites like to get rid of it. Dirt is the working layer of earth, and dealing with dirt is as much a part of farm life as dealing with manure. Neither is user-friendly but both are necessary.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, quote from The View from Saturday
“They called themselves The Souls. They told Ms. Olinski that they were The Souls before they were a team, but she told them that they were a team as soon as they became The Souls. Then after a while, teacher and team agreed that they were arguing chicken-or-egg. Whichever way it began--chicken-or-egg, team-or-The Souls--it definitely ended with an egg. Definitely, an egg.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, quote from The View from Saturday
“He also learned to regard each port of call as part of the journey and not as destination. Every voyage begins when you do.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, quote from The View from Saturday
“Inside me there was a lot of best friendship that no one but Ginger was using.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, quote from The View from Saturday
“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, quote from The View from Saturday
“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, quote from The View from Saturday
“After Margaret moved to Florida they continued to stay in touch in a Christmas card/life-milestone way.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, quote from The View from Saturday
“Mrs. Olinski was the first teacher Epiphany ever had who taught from a wheelchair.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, quote from The View from Saturday
“I chose a brunette, a redhead, a blond, and a kid with hair as black as print on paper.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, quote from The View from Saturday
E.L. Konigsburg
Born place: in New York, The United States
Born date February 10, 1930
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“Ah the mad hearts of all of us.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Visions of Cody
“Death is the only limit to the road you travel.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from The Hand of Oberon
“What, after all this time, is the purpose of mass schooling supposed to be? Reading, writing, and arithmetic can’t be the answer, because properly approached those things take less than a hundred hours to transmit — and we have abundant evidence that each is readily self-taught in the right setting and time. Why, then, are we locking kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years? Surely not so a few of them can get rich? Even if it worked that way, and I doubt that it does, why wouldn’t any sane community look on such an education as positively wrong? It divides and classifies people, demanding that they compulsively compete with each other, and publicly labels the losers by literally de-grading them, identifying them as “low-class” material. And the bottom line for the winners is that they can buy more stuff! I don’t believe that anyone who thinks about that feels comfortable with such a silly conclusion. I can’t help feeling that if we could only answer the question of what it is that we want from these kids we lock up, we would suddenly see where we took a wrong turn. I have enough faith in American imagination and resourcefulness to believe that at that point we’d come up with a better way — in fact, a whole supermarket of better ways.”
― John Taylor Gatto, quote from Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education
“GENTLEMEN You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. C. Vanderbilt”
― quote from Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt
“He didn't understand how sadness came so easily to people. For him it was like a pile of rocks that had to be moved one at a time. Just thinking about it made him tired.”
― Nell Freudenberger, quote from The Dissident
The House of Hades
Bloodlines
The Iron King
The Last Battle
Bleak House
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