Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
E. B. WHITESafety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
E. B. WHITEIn a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.
E. B. WHITEI am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn’t know where else to go.
E. B. WHITEWhen you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.
E. B. WHITEBe obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.
E. B. WHITELuck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
E. B. WHITEWell,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.
E. B. WHITENationalism 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. 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. WHITELife is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can’t erase it.
E. B. WHITENo one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.
E. B. WHITENauseous. 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. WHITEOld age is a special problem for me because I’ve never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself – a lad of about 19.
E. B. WHITECreation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.
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. WHITEIn 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