-
New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory season yielded more birds than I ever saw in Maine.
E. B. White -
There is simply a better chance of doing well if the writer holds a steady course, enters the stream of English quietly, and does not thrash about.
E. B. White
-
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.
E. B. White -
I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend - to make flights, carrying others along if you can manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit.
E. B. White -
The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.
E. B. White -
From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting. . . . On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain.
E. B. White -
A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.
E. B. White -
A schoolchild should be taught grammar—for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.
E. B. White
-
The siren south is well enough, but New York, at the beginning of March, is a hoyden we would not care to miss--a drafty wench, her temperature up and down, full of bold promises and dust in the eye.
E. B. White -
Deathlessness should be arrived at in a... haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.
E. B. White -
People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.
E. B. White -
Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.
E. B. White -
If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine's copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.
E. B. White -
Dentistry is more impressive in town-what the rural man calls cleaning the teeth is called "prophylaxis" in New York.
E. B. White