Quotes from E. B. White

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

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

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.

Don't write about Man; write about a man.

Half a man's life is devoted to what he calls improvements, yet the original had some quality which is lost in the process.

Dentistry is more impressive in town-what the rural man calls cleaning the teeth is called "prophylaxis" in New York.

A man must have something to cling to. Without that he is as a pea vine sprawling in search of a trellis.... I was all asprawl, clinging to Beauty, which is a very restless trellis.

Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits; it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men.

When a man hangs from a tree it doesn't spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him.

Not even a collapsing world looks dark to a man who is about to make his fortune.

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.

I seldom went to bed before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night.

People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.

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

The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.

A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there in a book, you may have your question answered

Good deeds never go unpunished.

A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.

I would really rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else

I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.

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

Home was quite a place when people stayed there.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.