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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

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E. L. Konigsburg
Age: 83 †
Born: 1930
Born: February 10
Died: 2013
Died: April 19
Novelist
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Elaine Lobl Konigsburg
E.L. Konigsburg
Thought
Clock
Take
Avoid
Believe
Western
Way
Civilization
Time
Hurt
Hurting
People
Maybe
Courtesy
Four
Tea
Feelings
Decline

More quotes by E. L. Konigsburg

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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.
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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.
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Can you know excellence if you've never seen it? Can you know good if you have seen only bad?
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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
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Ninety percent of who you are is invisible. - Mrs. Zender
E. L. Konigsburg
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Silence does for thinking what a suspension bridge does for space -- it makes connections.
E. L. Konigsburg
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Because after a time having a secret and nobody knowing you have a secret us no fun. And although you dont want others to know what the secret is, you want them to at least know you have one.
E. L. Konigsburg
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Never have a long conversation with anyone who says between you and I.
E. L. Konigsburg
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Indecisiveness wears a person out.
E. L. Konigsburg
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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
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It is sometimes necessary to use unnecessary words like thank you and please just to make life prettier.
E. L. Konigsburg
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I've been the oldest child since before you were born
E. L. Konigsburg
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Biding one's time is a very different thing from patience.
E. L. Konigsburg
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True simplicity is elegant.
E. L. Konigsburg
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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
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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