Top 100 E.B. White Quotes
#1. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time.
E.B. White
#2. I find it very disturbing to be advertised, as I have noticed that it is the advertised authors that stink. I am pretty sure I am going to stink from now on, and it might just as well be in Harpers as anywhere else, I suppose. A writer is like a beanplant-he has his day and then he gets stringy.
E.B. White
#3. No one had ever had such a friend - so affectionate, so loyal, and so skillful.
E.B. White
#4. I don't understand it, and I don't like what I don't understand.
E.B. White
#5. Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can't erase it.
E.B. White
#6. A right is a responsibility in reverse.
E.B. White
#7. Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.
E.B. White
#8. All poets who, when reading from their own works,m experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.
E.B. White
#9. The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.
E.B. White
#10. As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left us in a bad time.
E.B. White
#11. A schoolchild should be taught grammar
for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.
E.B. White
#12. Most people believe almost anything they see in print.
E.B. White
#13. The sky," he wrote on his slate, "is my living room. The woods are my parlor. The lonely lake is my bath. I can't remain behind a fence all my life.
E.B. White
#14. There is another sort of day which needs celebrating in song
the day of days when spring at last holds up her face to be kissed, deliberate and unabashed. On that day no wind blows either in the hills or in the mind.
E.B. White
#15. If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E.B. White
#16. When a man hangs from a tree it doesn't spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him.
E.B. White
#17. Some of the published news was distorted, but distortion is inherent in partisan journalism, the same as it is in political rallies.
E.B. White
#18. The greatest dangers to liberty," said Mr. Brandeis, "lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
E.B. White
#19. All his thoughts were of how lucky he was to inhabit such a beautiful earth, how lucky he had been to solve his problems with music, and how pleasant it was to look forward to another night of sleep and another day tomorrow, and the fresh morning, and the light that returns with the day.
E.B. White
#20. The essayist ... can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter - philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast.
E.B. White
#21. A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
E.B. White
#22. I got a letter from a lightning rod company this morning trying to out the fear of God in me, but with small success. Lightning seems to have lost its menace. Compared to what is going on on earth today, heaven's firebrands are penny fireworks with wet fuses.
E.B. White
#23. When you consider that there are a thousand ways to express even the simplest idea, it is no wonder writers are under a great strain. Writers care greatly how a thing is said - it makes all the difference. So they are constantly faced with too many choices and must make too many decisions.
E.B. White
#24. Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.
E.B. White
#25. Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.
E.B. White
#26. I was sorry for her, as I am for any who are evicted from their haunts by the younger and stronger - always a sad occasion for man or beast.
E.B. White
#27. Writing is not an exercise in excision, it's a journey into sound.
E.B. White
#28. Is there anything in the universe more beautiful and protective than the simple complexity of a spider's web?
E.B. White
#29. I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend - to make flights, carrying others along if you can manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit.
E.B. White
#30. Besides, my life is a catastrophe. It's a catastrophe to be without a voice.
E.B. White
#31. The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.
E.B. White
#32. An unhatched egg is to me the greatest challenge in life.
E.B. White
#33. If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble.
E.B. White
#34. Books are the door of escape from the forest.
E.B. White
#35. A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom-he fears a drunken poet may crack a joke that will take hold.
E.B. White
#36. hope my country will never become an uncomfortable place for the unbeliever, as it could easily become if prayer was made one of the requirements of the accredited citizen.
E.B. White
#37. A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
E.B. White
#38. A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer ... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
E.B. White
#39. The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.
E.B. White
#40. The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
E.B. White
#41. ...the thing ['Bedfellows'] didn't come out as clear as I would have liked, but nothing I write ever does.
E.B. White
#42. A husband and wife should tell each other about the things that are on their mind, otherwise you get nowhere,
E.B. White
#43. The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.
E.B. White
#44. Good things come to those who find it and shove it in their mouth!
E.B. White
#45. Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.
E.B. White
#46. As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.
E.B. White
#47. The value of the liberal in the republic is not that he is logical but that he is inquisitive.
E.B. White
#48. America is now liberty-conscious. In a single generation it has progressed from being toothbrush-conscious, to being air-minded, to being liberty-conscious.
E.B. White
#49. There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.
E.B. White
#50. All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of the weather who walks bent over on wet days.
E.B. White
#51. [S]ometimes in writing of myself ... I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure, an antic sound.
E.B. White
#52. A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
E.B. White
#53. At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream.
E.B. White
#54. Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,
In spider's web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken strand to you
For my returning.
E.B. White
#55. A "fraternity" is the antithesis of fraternity. The first ... is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality.
E.B. White
#56. Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp - everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.
E.B. White
#57. The concern of a democracy is that no honest man shall feel uncomfortable, I don't care who he is, or how nutty he is.
E.B. White
#58. Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.
E.B. White
#59. It is not possible to keep abreast of the normal tides of acquisition. A home is like a reservoir equipped with a check valve: the valve permits influx but prevents outflow.
E.B. White
#60. In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into panic.
E.B. White
#61. It is deeply satisfying to win a prize in front of a lot of people.
E.B. White
#62. He wiped his face with his handkerchief, for he was quite warm from the exertion of being Chairman of the World. It had taken more running and leaping and sliding than he had imagined.
E.B. White
#63. In a man's middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.
E.B. White
#64. Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
E.B. White
#65. Life is always a rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.
E.B. White
#66. Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society - things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.
E.B. White
#67. I don't know why people feel unhappy when the curve of a graph fails to keep going up, but they do. Even when we find something we'd like to reduce, such as highway fatalities, it doesn't always sound as though we had our heart in it.
E.B. White
#68. It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn't catch the remark because I wasn't paying attention.
E.B. White
#69. There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.
E.B. White
#70. Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky's and our Camelot.
E.B. White
#72. Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
E.B. White
#73. To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.
E.B. White
#74. It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.
E.B. White
#75. There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.
E.B. White
#76. We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny ... The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.
E.B. White
#77. Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.
E.B. White
#78. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
E.B. White
#79. When I address Fred I never have to raise either my voice or my hopes.
E.B. White
#81. In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech-that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.
E.B. White
#82. It sometimes takes days, even weeks, before a dog's nerves tire. In the case of terriers it can run into months.
E.B. White
#83. A library is many things, but particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books ... Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had.
E.B. White
#84. A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself. Yet our country, seen through the mists of smog, is curiously lovable, in somewhat the way an individual who has got himself into an unconscionable scrape seems lovable - or at least deserving of support.
E.B. White
#85. Too many things on my mind, said Wilbur.
Well, said the goose, that's not my trouble. I have nothing at all on my mind, but I've too many things under my behind.
E.B. White
#86. Very fine law," said Stuart. "When I am Chairman, anybody who is mean to anybody else is going to catch it.
E.B. White
#87. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
E.B. White
#88. You're terrific as far as I am concerned.
E.B. White
#89. The Herald Tribune headed the story, "PRESIDENT SAYS PRAYER IS PART OF DEMOCRACY." The implication in such a pronouncement, emanating from the seat of government, is that religious faith is a condition, or even a precondition, of the democratic life.
E.B. White
#90. It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members.
E.B. White
#92. Something that he wants to do. And when I answer his peremptory scratch at the door and hold the door open for him to walk through, he stops in the middle and lights a cigarette, just to hold me up.
E.B. White
#93. Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy.
E.B. White
#94. I have a spaniel that defrocked a nun last week. He took hold of the cord. I had hold of the leash. It was like elephants holding tails. Imagine me undressing a nun, even second hand.
E.B. White
#95. Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together-just the two of you.
E.B. White
#96. I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.
E.B. White
#97. I hope that Belief never is made to appear mandatory.
E.B. White
#98. Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will.
E.B. White
#99. In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.
E.B. White
#100. An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
E.B. White
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