Top 100 E.b. Quotes
#1. Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls "E. B. White's disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk's little hodgepodge of bad grammar advice and stylistic banalities" or
Robert Lane Greene
#2. Nobody ever stopped reading E. B. White or V. S. Pritchett because the writing was too good.
William Zinsser
#3. SeLF censorsHIP?
Not my strong suit ... I dont want to be a total d o u c h e b a g , but a little bit of one.
Misha Collins
#4. Quoting E. B. White is the easiest way I know of to fool people into thinking that I am perceptive, witty, and wise.
Peter Behrens
#5. The way I was educated, maybe from just inhaling something in the air back then, I grew up believing that E. B. White occupied the apex of essay writing.
Paul Di Filippo
#6. E. B. White had a romantic tenderness toward nature in a capital R, 19th-century way. He was knowledgeable, a part-time farmer, and a hardheaded realistic person.
Michael Sims
#7. You have been my friend," replied Charlotte. "That in itself is a tremendous thing." - E. B. White
Ann Brashares
#8. If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Du Bois's famous words, "the problem of the color line," then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification.
Naomi Murakawa
#9. For books are people... people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book."
E B White.
Nigel Jay Cooper
#10. In his New Yorker column of July 27, 1957, E. B. White praised the "little book" as a "forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.
William Strunk Jr.
#11. E.B. White's essays are the best things I've read about Maine - especially the one in which he's not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop.
Nicholson Baker
#12. I'd been a housewife and mother to our son Thomas Jefferson, and I was looking for a new career. So when my agent called and said a producer named Paul Elliott from E&B productions, the biggest panto company in the country at the time, wanted to meet me I agreed.
Britt Ekland
#13. E. B. White once wrote, I can't decide whether to enjoy the world or improve the world; that makes it difficult to plan the day.
Barbara Brown Taylor
#14. When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair. -E.B. White
E.B. White
#15. As E.B. White said, "A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.
Morgan Gist MacDonald
#16. Author E.B. White once captured the essence of why. "I wake up in the morning unsure of whether I want to savor the world or save the world," White said, "This makes it hard to plan the day.
Anonymous
#17. I read a lot of W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote 'The Souls of Black Folk.'
Andre Holland
#18. In his book The Soul of Black Folks, W.E.B. DuBois writes about always feeling his twoness
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; to warring ideals in one dark body.
Ron Suskind
#19. You can ascend to the region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. The shelter that received the risen Christ and Port in The Sheltering Sky, that comforted the mortally wounded Prince Andrei and the young W. E. B. Du Bois.
Nell Zink
#20. g*d wept, but that mattered little to an unbelieving age ... for there began to rise in America in 1876 a new capitalism & a new enslavement of labor" --w.e.b. dubois
Debois
#21. A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#22. [Writers] should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
E.B. White
#23. Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north ... As he peeked ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.
E.B. White
#24. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time.
E.B. White
#25. Write about it by day and dream about it by night.
E.B. White
#26. It would still be a long way until she was completely free, but the door had been cracked open and a smidgen of hope broke through the darkness.
J.E.B. Spredemann
#27. I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.
E.B. White
#28. The light strengthened, the mornings came sooner.
E.B. White
#29. 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
#30. Don Marquis came down after a month on the wagon, ambled over to the bar, and announced, 'I've conquered that goddamn willpower of mine. Gimme a double Scotch.
E.B. White
#31. No one had ever had such a friend - so affectionate, so loyal, and so skillful.
E.B. White
#32. when you truly love someone, you share a bond that transcends the physical world.
E.B. Walters
#33. There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#34. Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.
E.B. White
#35. Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They'll believe anything they see in print.
E.B. White
#36. I don't understand it, and I don't like what I don't understand.
E.B. White
#37. The young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.
E.B. White
#38. In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future and faith. All words and all thinking lead to the child, - to that vast immortality and wide sweep of infinite possibility which the child represents.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#40. Education is that whole system of human training within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#41. When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#42. I believe that all men, black, brown, and white, are brothers.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#43. In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#44. Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.
E.B. White
#45. His words span rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.
E.B. White
#46. We thought being offered the M.B.E. [Member of the Order of the British Empire] was as funny as everybody else thought it was. Why? What for? We didn't believe it. It was a part we didn't want. We all met and agreed it was daft.
John Lennon
#47. Humor plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat.
E.B. White
#48. New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory season yielded more birds than I ever saw in Maine.
E.B. White
#49. Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
E.B. White
#50. A. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.
Cynthia Ozick
#51. Always Remember to take your Vitamins: Take your Vitamin A for ACTION, Vitamin B for Belief, Vitamin C for Confidence ,Vitamin D for Discipline, Vitamin E for Enthusiasm!!
Pablo
#52. Fern was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice. As a result, she now has a pig. A small one to be sure, but nevertheless a pig. It just shows what can happen if a person gets out of bed promptly.
E.B. White
#53. Dentistry is more impressive in town-what the rural man calls cleaning the teeth is called "prophylaxis" in New York.
E.B. White
#54. A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.
E.B. White
#55. Bishop Hostettler explained that baptism was not the means by which one is saved, but simply an outward sign of salvation. Just as an Amishman's beard is an indication of his marriage and commitment to his wife, so baptism symbolizes our covenant with Christ.
J.E.B. Spredemann
#56. Home was quite a place when people stayed there.
E.B. White
#57. Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can't erase it.
E.B. White
#58. Einstein is loved because he is gentle, respected because he is wise. Relativity being not for most of us, we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison, who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the hope of penetrating it.
E.B. White
#59. You are always sending us to our deaths. We're soldiers, it is what we do.
B.E.L. Forsythe
#61. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#62. In private life, human beings spend a great deal of time in seclusion behind closed doors (e.g., in bathrooms and bedrooms) and other partitions designed to shield their bodies from prying eyes. Scientists have determined that too much visual monitoring can be harmful to human health.
David B. Givens
#63. I believe that there are human stocks with whom it is physically unwise to intermarry, but to think that these stocks are all colored or that there are no such white stocks is unscientific and false.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#64. When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.
E.B. White
#65. 43I have come b in my Father's name, and c you do not receive me. d If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. 44How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and e do not seek the glory that comes from f the only God?
Anonymous
#66. A right is a responsibility in reverse.
E.B. White
#67. I love them, but sometimes it would have been nice to be able to b e a kid who didn't have to act like an adult so much of the time. - Amber Brown
Paula Danziger
#68. A SPIDER'S web is stronger than it looks. Although it is made of thin, delicate strands, the web is not easily broken. However, a web gets torn every day by the insects that kick around in it, and a spider must rebuild it when it gets full of holes.
E.B. White
#69. Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#70. The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#71. Government is the thing. Law is the thing. Not brotherhood, not international cooperation, not security councils that can stop war only by waging it ... Where does security lie, anyway - security against the thief, a bad man, the murderer? In brotherly love? Not at all. It lies in government.
E.B. White
#72. A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#73. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#74. 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
#75. Once you begin watching spiders, you haven't time for much else.
E.B. White
#76. From this we may conclude that it behooves nations as well as men to do things at the very moment when they ought to be done.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#77. Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#78. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
E.B. White
#79. It's been said that only the educated are free, but I contend. Only those who are educated with TRUTH can be inherently free. Otherwise, you are simply indoctrinated with error.
J.E.B. Spredemann
#80. 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
#81. And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough one-ness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#82. 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
#83. The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#84. And yet this does not touch the kernel of the problem. Human advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving, but rather of sympathy and cooperation among classes who would scorn charity.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#85. The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#86. Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.
E.B. White
#87. 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
#88. Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
E.B. White
#89. The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense,
else what shall save us from a second slavery?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#90. 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
#91. In the year 399 B.C.[E.] he was accused of "introducing new gods and corrupting the youth," as well as not believing in the accepted gods. With a slender majority, a jury of five hundred found him guilty.
Jostein Gaarder
#92. It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disenfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#93. Use the smallest word that does the job.
E.B. White
#94. One ever feels his twoness,
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#95. He was sad because his new friend was so bloodthirsty.
E.B. White
#96. I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#97. Most people believe almost anything they see in print.
E.B. White
#98. 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
#99. (Not every doctor can look into a mouse's ear without laughing)
E.B. White
#100. I believe ... that security declines as security machinery expands.
E.B. White
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