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.
—E. B. White
Topics: Weather
An intelligence service is, in fact, a stupidity service
—E. B. White
Topics: Intelligence
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing
Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams—Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.
—E. B. White
Topics: Advertising
The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay
—E. B. White
Topics: Language
There is no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.
—E. B. White
Topics: Consequences
A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself. Yet our country, seen through the mists of smog, is curiously lovable, in somewhat the way an individual who has got himself into an unconscionable scrape seems lovable—or at least deserving of support.
—E. B. White
Topics: America
Be obscure clearly.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing
The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man’s invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog’s way too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk.
—E. B. White
Topics: Liberalism
I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. “Never worry about your heart ’til it stops beating.”
—E. B. White
Topics: Worry
The whole problem is to establish communication with one’s self.
—E. B. White
Topics: Problems, Communication
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.
—E. B. White
Topics: Cities, City Life
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
—E. B. White
Topics: Humor
To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.
—E. B. White
Topics: Gifts
A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.
—E. B. White
Topics: Politicians, Politics
I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they
—E. B. White
Topics: Anger
Life is always a rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch
—E. B. White
Topics: Pregnancy
Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing
The total collapse of the public opinion polls shows that this country is in good health. A country that developed an airtight system of finding out in advance what was in people’s minds would be uninhabitable.
—E. B. White
Topics: Politics
In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.
—E. B. White
Topics: Aging, Age
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.
—E. B. White
Topics: Nature
Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
—E. B. White
Topics: Vulgarity, Swearing, Profanity
In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.
—E. B. White
Topics: Television
Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
—E. B. White
Topics: Luck
A right is a responsibility in reverse.
—E. B. White
The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler.
—E. B. White
Topics: Television
A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.
—E. B. White
Topics: Poetry, Poets
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But 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.
—E. B. White
Topics: Planning, Life
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
—E. B. White
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- John Updike American Author
- David Wagoner American Poet, Novelist
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
- Paul Auster American Novelist, Poet
- Hervey Allen American Author
- Wendell Berry American Author, Environmentalist
- L. Frank Baum American Writer
- Jack Kerouac American Novelist, Poet
- Edgar Lee Masters American Poet, Novelist
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