E. B. White

Quotes

• “A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer he approaches lucid ground warily like a mariner who is determined not...”
• “If the world were merely seductive that would be easy. If it were merely challenging that would be no problem. But I r...”
• “The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields there in dalliance to set an exa...”
• “When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bur...”
• “Reading is the work of the alert mind is demanding and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy. This...”
• “Commuter - One who spends his life in riding to and from his wife a man who shaves and takes a train and then rides ba...”
• “Old 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 ab...”
• “Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness natives give it solidity and continuity but the settlers give it passio...”
• “Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man write about a man.”
• “Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.”
• “His words leap across rivers and mountains but his thoughts are still only six inches long.”
• “Humour plays close to the big hot fire which is the truth and the reader feels the heat.”
• “Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.”
• “To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.”
• “A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.”
• “Humour can be dissected as a frog can but the thing dies in the process.”
• “Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”
• “Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.”
• “Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.”
• “The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.”
• “Writing is hard work and bad for the health.”
• “Be obscure clearly.”