E. B. White Quotes
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"What's miraculous about a spider's web?" said Mrs. Arable. "I don't see why you say a web is a miracle--it's just a web."
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Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.
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The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.
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Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn't. And everybody is always somewhere else.
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In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech-that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.
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A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.
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Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.
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I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
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The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
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It sometimes takes days, even weeks, before a dog's nerves tire. In the case of terriers it can run into months.
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All poets who, when reading from their own works, experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.
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I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially.
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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.
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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.
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By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
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Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same.
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It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn't catch the remark because I wasn't paying attention.
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New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.
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Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent? These are high mysteries, and this chapter is a mystery story, thinly disguised.
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I can still see my first dog. For six years he met me at the same place after school and convoyed me home - a service he thought up himself. A boy doesn't forget that sort of association.
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A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there in a book, you may have your question answered
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An unhatched egg is to me the greatest challenge in life.
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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.
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The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.