To achieve style, begin by affecting none.
E. B. WHITETo achieve style, begin by affecting none.
E. B. WHITELife is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can’t erase it.
E. B. WHITEFern was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice. As a result, she now has a pig. A small one to be sure, but nevertheless a pig. It just shows what can happen if a person gets out of bed promptly.
E. B. WHITEIt can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck.
E. B. WHITEGood deeds never go unpunished.
E. B. WHITEWriting is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
E. B. WHITEWriting is hard work and bad for the health.
E. B. WHITEI’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. WHITEYou can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.
E. B. WHITENever hurry and never worry!
E. B. WHITEThere is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.
E. B. WHITENo one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
E. B. WHITEWriting is both mask and unveiling.
E. B. WHITEWilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
E. B. WHITEMost people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.
E. B. WHITEA good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
E. B. WHITE