When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.
E. B. WHITEOh, I never look under the hood.
More E. B. White Quotes
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The city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.
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I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. “Never worry about your heart till it stops beating.
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A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
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English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education – sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.
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Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first.
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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.
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The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
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I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.
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A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.
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An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
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The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.
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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.
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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.
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There’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.
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I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
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You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway?
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The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.
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There 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.
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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.
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There 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.
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Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
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All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.
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Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print.
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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.
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Life’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.
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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