Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.
E. B. WHITEThere are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter.
More E. B. White Quotes
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Writing is both mask and unveiling.
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 -
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
E. B. WHITE -
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.
E. B. WHITE -
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
E. B. WHITE -
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.
E. B. WHITE -
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.
E. B. WHITE -
Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one’s belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote.
E. B. WHITE -
“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.” “Ever try to spin one?” asked Mr. Dorian.
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Loneliness is a strange gift.
E. B. WHITE -
We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. 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.
E. B. WHITE -
Oh, I never look under the hood.
E. B. WHITE -
The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
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Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.
E. B. WHITE -
In a man’s middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.
E. B. WHITE