Quotes from E. B. White

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

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.

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

Humor is like a frog. You can dissect it to see how it works, but by then, it's dead.

In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.

A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.

Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people-- people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.

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

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

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

By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.

Once in everyone's life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half-asleep.

Life is always rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes, this makes planning the day difficult.

But real life is only one kind of life—there is also the life of the imagination.

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

I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. "Never worry about your heart 'til it stops beating."

I awake each morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savour the world. This makes it hard to plan my day.

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.†

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

I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears as much as your editorial, on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic.