E. B. White's Quotes

The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.

The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.

The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance.

The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.

There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.

Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.

All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of the weather who walks bent over on wet days.

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

Be obscure clearly.

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

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.

We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.

To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.