E. L. Konigsburg: Ninety percent of who you are is invisible."

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

deals should facts

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

E. L. Konigsburg

happy littles happiness

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

E. L. Konigsburg

just-be-yourself being-yourself hardest

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

E. L. Konigsburg

bird people way

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.

E. L. Konigsburg

vacation home adventure

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

book children past

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

sleep inspirational lying

Often the search proves more profitable than the goal.

E. L. Konigsburg

prove goal journey

I'm not sure that love and like aren't like cats and dogs: One can't grow up to be the other, but they can be taught to live under the same roof.

E. L. Konigsburg

growing-up cat dog

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

risk successful mistake

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

E. L. Konigsburg

use thank-you sometimes

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

E. L. Konigsburg

hug important

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

differences earth friendly

...just because I don't have on a silly black costume and carry a silly broom and wear a silly black hat, doesn't mean that I'm not a witch. I'm a witch all the time and not just on Halloween.

E. L. Konigsburg

halloween silly mean

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

different secret adventure

Sometimes we even have to risk making fools of ourselves.

E. L. Konigsburg

fool risk life

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

rejection sarcastic letters

There's something nice and safe about having money.

E. L. Konigsburg

nice safe

Sometimes silence is a habit that hurts?

E. L. Konigsburg

silence hurt sometimes

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

acceptance kids children

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