Loneliness is a strange gift.
E. B. WHITELoneliness is a strange gift.
E. B. WHITEMake the work interesting and the discipline will take care of itself.
E. B. WHITEYou’re terrific as far as I am concerned.
E. B. WHITESailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.
E. B. WHITEI am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.
E. B. WHITEI see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.
E. B. WHITEDemocracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
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.
E. B. WHITEHabitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.
E. B. WHITEA poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
E. B. WHITEThe 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.
E. B. WHITEWe’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. WHITEAnd then, just as Wilbur was settling down for his morning nap, he heard again the thin voice that had addressed him the night before. “Salutations!” said the voice. Wilbur jumped to his feet. “Salu-what?” he cried. “Salutations!” repeated the voice.
E. B. WHITEFrom 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. WHITEA good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
E. B. WHITEThe whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.
E. B. WHITE