Quotes from E. B. White

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

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

The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.

The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.

A "fraternity" is the antithesis of fraternity. The first... is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality.

After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.

Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.

It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

In a man's middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

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

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

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.

The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.

I believe... that security declines as security machinery expands.

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.

Deathlessness should be arrived at in a... haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.

Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

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.