E. B. White Quotes

168 Sourced Quotes

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.

E. B. White
Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

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.

E. B. White
None of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

E. B. White
A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.

E. B. White
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
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
One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

E. B. White
Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

E. B. White
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
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.

E. B. White
A breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.

E. B. White
The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.

E. B. White
"It's broccoli, dear."
"I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it."

E. B. White
A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm.

E. B. White
Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.

E. B. White
In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence.

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.

E. B. White
I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.

E. B. White
New york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.

E. B. White
A shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note of music, and the way the back of a baby's neck smells if it's mother keeps it tidy, answered Henry. Correct, said Stuart. Those are the important things. You forgot one thing, though. Mary Bendix, what did Henry Rackmeyer forget? He forgot ice cream with chocolate sauce on it, said Mary quickly.

E. B. White
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.

E. B. White
The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he 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
Did it ever occur to you that there's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another?

E. B. White
On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.

E. B. White
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.

E. B. White
Make the work interesting and the discipline will take care of itself.

E. B. White
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
It is deeply satisfying to win a prize in front of a lot of people.

E. B. White