“I was the first one in my family to go away to college. I came from a ...” — E. L. Konigsburg Quote

“I was the first one in my family to go away to college. I came from a small town where there was no guidance in the high school at all. It was a mill town, and I never knew anyone who made their living from the arts. When you did go away to college, you went away to be something - an engineer, or a teacher, or a chemist.”

“Art comes from a visceral need and is usually generated by something I have seen; writing comes from something that happens in my head and my heart.”

“I think it's important to experience kindness so that you can experience it more in the future. I believe that patterns of emotional behavior are set down before adolescence. And I think that if you have not observed kindness, you will not recognize it. You have to experience kindness in order to be kind.”

“I came from a family of scientists. My father is a microbiologist and my grandfather is an organic chemist. I had a very science- and math-heavy childhood.”

“My mom is an experimental chemist and physicist, so she is a cut-and-dried, nuts-and-bolts kind of woman, and my dad is a theoretical chemist, so we were definitely raised with his philosophical point of view: imaginary numbers and dimensions beyond our own. That's the kind of thing we would talk about.”

“Yes, from the time I was in junior high school I decided I wanted to be a chemist. I didn't quite know what a chemist was, but I kept it up and got my Ph.D. in physical chemistry.”