E. L. Konigsburg Quotes

A friend was surprised to hear me say that there was not one moment of my past that I would like to relive.

My time in New England was great. I thank them for everything.

Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we'll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.

Moments are so fleeting; I want to hold on to the good ones.

One day these will just be memories that I haveso I try to enjoy it as much as possible

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me.

The adventure is over. Everything gets over, and nothing is ever enough. Except the part you carry with you.

I lost my dad. He lost his tomorrows and I lost all the tomorrows with him. You could say that now, I appreciate them when they come. Now, I want to make them the best they can possibly be.

I love cameras but I find myself reluctantly taking pictures because what's past is past.

A memory from my youth comes back to me. You go into the woods on a bike, with a girl. There is the smell of heather, you can hear the wind in the fir trees, you don't dare tell her about your love, but you feel happy, as if you were floating above the ground. Then you look at the clouds beyond the trees and they are fleeting. And you know that within an hour you'll have to go home, that tomorrow will be a working day. You wish you could stop that moment forever, but you can't, it is bound to end. So you take a photo, as if to challenge time.

The past is not a package one can lay away.

We should enjoy this summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we’ll see.

Everyone lets the present moment slip by, then looks for it as though he thought it was somewhere else. No one seems to have noticed this fact. But grasping this firmly, one must pile experience upon experience. And once one has come to this understanding he will be a different person from that point on, though he may not always bare it in mind. When one understands this settling into single-mindedness well, his affairs will thin out.

You can't live in the past, and I don't. I'm not nostalgic about my own work, at all.

Life is not a race to restore a past situation. Nor does one have to hurry to meet the future. Seeing how things change is what makes life interesting.

Enjoy the moment, because that is all you have. You never are going to arrive someplace else. You are in a constant state of living in this moment, and that is the only arrival there is. In fact, you will arrive when you stop trying to get someplace else.

Travel releases spontaneity. You become a godlike creature full or choice, free to visit the stately pleasure domes, make love in the morning, sketch a bell tower, read a history of Byzantium, stare for one hour at the face of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Madonna dei fusi.' You open, as in childhood, and--for a time--receive this world. There's visceral aspect, too--the huntress who is free. Free to go, free to return home bringing memories to lay on the hearth.

Every hour spent on the Caine was a great hour in all our lives-if you don't think so now you will later on, more and more.

Well, anyway, her death changed our lives for the better, because it brought a kind of awareness, a specific sense of purpose and appreciation we hadn't had before. Would I trade that in order to have her back? In a fraction of a millisecond. But I won't ever have her back. So I have taken this, as her great gift to us. But. Do I block her out? Never. Do I think of her? Always. In some part of my brain, I think of her every single moment of every single day.

At my age you find yourself looking back from time to time and you begin to appreciate some of the things that happened to you.

It's not getting from A to B. It's not the beginning or the destination that counts. It's the ride in between...This train is alive with things that should be seen and heard. It's a living, breathing something -- you just have to want to learn its rhythm.

Nothing is a waste that makes a memory.