E. B. White quotes - page 5

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)

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

From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.

E. B. White

Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be.

E. B. White

I don't understand it, and I don't like what I don't understand.

E. B. White

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

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

Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.

E. B. White

It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.

E. B. White

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.

E. B. White

Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky's and our Camelot. (E. B. White)

The siren south is well enough, but New York, at the beginning of March, is a hoyden we would not care to miss-a drafty wench, her temperature up and down, full of bold promises and dust in the eye.

E. B. White

Wilbur didn't want food, he wanted love.

E. B. White

I would really rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else.

E. B. White

Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly.

E. B. White

The Chinese delegate blinked his eyes and produced a shoebox, from which he drew a living flower which looked very like an iris. 'What is that?' they all inquired, pleased with the sight of so delicate a symbol. 'That,' said the Chinese, 'is a wild flag, Iris tectorum. In China we have decided to adopt this flag, since it is a convenient and universal device and very beautiful and grows everywhere in the moist places of the earth for all to observe and wonder at. I propose all countries adopt it, so that it will be impossible for us to insult each other's flag.'

E. B. White

It is the oldest flag in the world, the original one, you might say. We are now, in an original condition again, you might say.

E. B. White

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.

E. B. White

We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny...

E. B. White

Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words.

E. B. White

At this juncture we might conceivably act in a sensible, rather than a popular, manner. (E. B. White)

Government is the thing. Law is the thing.

E. B. White

This is the dream we had, asleep in our chair, thinking of Christmas in the lands of fir tree and pine, Christmas in lands of palm tree and vine, and of how the one great sky does for all places and all people.

E. B. White

In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

E. B. White

I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear.

E. B. White

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E. B. White

Occupation: American Writer
Born: July 11, 1899
Died: October 1, 1985
Quotes count: 132
Wikipedia: E. B. White

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