E. B. White Quotes - Page 4

Extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life's dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive.

Never hurry and never worry!

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

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.

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

The sea answers all questions, and always in the same way; for when you read in the papers the interminable discussions and the bickering and the prognostications and the turmoil, the disagreements and the fateful decisions and agreements and the plans and the programs and the threats and the counter threats, then you close your eyes and the sea dispatches one more big roller in the unbroken line since the beginning of the world and it combs and breaks and returns foaming and saying: "So soon?" E. B. White "On A Florida Key

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

A schoolchild should be taught grammar—for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.

Books are the door of escape from the forest.

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

It is Sunday, mid-morning-Sunday in the living room, Sunday in the kitchen, Sunday in the woodshed, Sunday down the road in the village: I hear the bells, calling me to share God's grace.

Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.

Is there anything in the universe more beautiful and protective than the simple complexity of a spider's web?

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.

Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.

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.

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.

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

If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

Understanding humor is like dissecting a live frog. It can be done, but the frog tends to die in the process.

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

All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.

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.

I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.