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.
-
Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
-
This is what youth must figure out: Girls, love, and living. The having, the not having, The spending and giving, And the meloncholy time of not knowing. This is what age must learn about: The ABC of dying. The going, yet not going, The loving and leaving, And the unbearable knowing and knowing
-
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
-
Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together-just the two of you.
-
If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most.
-
People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.
-
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.
-
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.
-
Too many things on my mind, said Wilbur. Well, said the goose, that's not my trouble. I have nothing at all on my mind, but I've too many things under my behind.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I seldom went to bed before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night.
-
Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
-
There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.
-
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
-
Advice to young writers wo want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.
-
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
-
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.
-
Where I would like to discover facts, I find fancy. Where I would like to learn what I did, I learn only what I was thinking. Theyare loaded with opinion, moral thoughts, quick evaluations, youthful hopes and cares and sorrows. Occasionally, they manage to report something in exquisite honesty and accuracy. That is why I have refrained from burning them.
-
A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.
-
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 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.