E. B. White Quotes
-
It isn't silence you can cut with a knife any more, it's interchange of ideas. Intelligent discussion of practically everything is what is breaking up modern marriage.
-
The circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade.
-
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.
-
When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.
-
Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
-
Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.
-
A writer's style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacites, his bias...it is the Self escaping into the open.
-
Advice to young writers wo want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.
-
A schoolchild should be taught grammar—for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.
-
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
-
A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.
-
The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.
-
The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich and the wounds of the poor.
-
Nauseous. Nauseated. The first means "sickening to contemplate"; the second means "sick at the stomach." Do not, therefore, say "I feel nauseous," unless you are sure you have that effect on others.
-
Much of our adult morality, in books and out of them, has a stuffiness unworthy of childhood. Our grown-up conclusions often rest on perilously soft bottom.
-
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.
-
The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself he is approaching, no other; and he should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style - all mannerisms, tricks, adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.
-
Dentistry is more impressive in town-what the rural man calls cleaning the teeth is called "prophylaxis" in New York.
-
The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything
-
A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
-
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.
-
A man must have something to cling to. Without that he is as a pea vine sprawling in search of a trellis.... I was all asprawl, clinging to Beauty, which is a very restless trellis.
-
Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do, In spider’s web a truth discerning, Attach one silken strand to you For my returning.
-
The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation's pulse, you can't be sure that the nation hasn't just run up a flight of stairs.