E. B. White Quotes

168 Sourced Quotes

Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same.

E. B. White
I am lingering in Maine this winter, to fight wolves and foxes. The sun here is less strong than Florida's, but so is the spirit of development.

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. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.

E. B. White
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
The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.

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

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

E. B. White
Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.

E. B. White
A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, the writer must cultivate patience, working many covers to bring down one partridge.

E. B. White
A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom — he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.

E. B. White
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
The delegate from Patagonia spoke up. 'I fear that the wild flag, one for all, will prove an unpopular idea.'
'It will, undoubtedly,' sighed the Chinese delegate. 'But now that there are only a couple of hundred people on earth, even the word "unpopular" loses most of its meaning. At this juncture we might conceivably act in a sensible, rather than a popular, manner.' And he produced eighty-two more shoeboxes and handed a wild flag to each delegate, bowing ceremoniously.
Next day the convention broke up and the delegates returned to their homes, marveling at what they had accomplished in so short a time. And that is the end of our dream.

E. B. White
I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles.

E. B. White
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
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 millions... Of all targets New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

E. B. White
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
Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people—people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

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

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

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

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
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