E. B. White - One Man's Meat (1944)

13 Sourced Quotes

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

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

E. B. White
Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.

E. B. White
Not even a collapsing world looks dark to a man who is about to make his fortune.

E. B. White
The trouble with the profit system has always been that it is highly unprofitable to most people.

E. B. White
I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television — of that I am quite sure.

E. B. White
The future, wave or no wave, seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done.

E. B. White
Once in everyone's life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half asleep. I think of those five years in Maine as the time when this happened to me … I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens. It was one of those rare interludes that can never be repeated, a time of enchantment. I am fortunate indeed to have had the chance to get some of it down on paper.

E. B. White
I am always humbled by the infinite ingenuity of the lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.

E. B. White
He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

E. B. White
Before you can be an internationalist you have first to be a naturalist and feel the ground under you making a whole circle. It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members. A club, moreover, or a nation, has a most attractive offer to make: it offers the right to be exclusive. There are not many of us who are physically constituted to resist this strange delight, this nourishing privilege. It is at the bottom of all fraternities, societies, orders. It is at the bottom of most trouble. The planet holds out no such inducement. The planet is everybody's. All it offers is the grass, the sky, the water, the ineluctable dream of peace and fruition.

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

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