E. B. White quotes - page 3

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street. (E. B. White)
Writing is hard work and bad for the health. View quote
E. B. White
Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor. View quote
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new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing. View quote
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When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad. View quote
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The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people. View quote
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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 dont like a Communist. View quote
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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. View quote
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Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim. View quote
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To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year. View quote
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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)
The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative. View quote
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Be obscure clearly. View quote
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Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn't. And everybody is always somewhere else. View quote
E. B. White
Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams - Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword. View quote
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The future, wave or no wave, seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done. View quote
E. B. White
Ideally, a book of letters should be published posthumously. The advantages are obvious: the editor enjoys a free hand, and the author enjoys a perfect hiding place - the grave, where he is impervious to embarrassments and beyond the reach of libel. I have failed to cooperate with this ideal arrangement. Through some typical bit of mismanagement, I am still alive, and the book has had to adjust to that awkward fact. View quote
E. B. White
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 (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. View quote
E. B. White
I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens. View quote
E. B. White
The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance. View quote
E. B. White
A writer is like a bean plant he has his day and then becomes stringy. (E. B. White)
What is life We are born, we live a little and we die. View quote
E. B. White
I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears as much as your editorial, on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic. View quote
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Charlotte's message in Charlotte's Web (1952) View quote
E. B. White
The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. View quote
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