I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty-everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?
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.
More E. B. White Quotes
-
-
We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.
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 -
I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.
E. B. WHITE -
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 -
Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people– people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.
E. B. WHITE -
Understanding humor is like dissecting a live frog. It can be done, but the frog tends to die in the process.
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 -
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.
E. B. WHITE -
Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.
E. B. WHITE -
When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.
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.
E. B. WHITE -
You’re terrific as far as I am concerned.
E. B. WHITE -
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.
E. B. WHITE -
Never hurry and never worry!
E. B. WHITE -
Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
E. B. WHITE -
“What are they, and where are you?” screamed Wilbur. “Please, please, tell me where you are. And what are salutations?” “Salutations are greetings,” said the voice. “When I say ‘salutations,’ it’s just my fancy way of saying hello or good morning.
E. B. WHITE -
I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.
E. B. WHITE -
The 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 -
I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
E. B. WHITE -
I have noticed that most men when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wanderings, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended.
E. B. WHITE -
All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.
E. B. WHITE -
Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.
E. B. WHITE -
Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
E. B. WHITE -
Life’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.
E. B. WHITE -
There is hardly a waiting room in the east that has not served as my cockpit, whether I was waiting to board a train or to see a dentist. And I am usually still trimming sheets when the train starts or drill begins to whine.
E. B. WHITE -
People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.
E. B. WHITE