Quotes from E. B. White

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.

There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.

Wilbur didn't want food, he wanted love.

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

To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.

Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.

Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do, In spider's web a truth discerning, Attach one silken strand to you For my returning.

I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

Advice to young writers wo want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.

Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.

His words leap across rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.

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

Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process.

We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

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

A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. 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. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savour) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever . . . the cottages with their innocent and tranquil design, their tiny docks with the flagpole and the American flag floating against the white clouds in the blue sky, the little paths over the roots of the trees leading from camp to camp. This was the American family at play, escaping the city heat.

I liked to sail alone. The sea was the same as a girl to me - I did not want anyone else along.

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 clock an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.