E. B. White Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do, In spider’s web a truth discerning, Attach one silken strand to you For my returning.
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People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.
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Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.
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In a man's middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.
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New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer-he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along.
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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.
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Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.