Quotes from E. B. White

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

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

Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

It isn't silence you can cut with a knife any more, it's interchange of ideas. Intelligent discussion of practically everything is what is breaking up modern marriage.

A schoolchild should be taught grammar—for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.

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

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left us in a bad time.

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.

It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members.

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.

If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most.

The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance.

If I can fool a bug... I can surely fool a man. People are not as smart as bugs.

The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.

Be obscure clearly.

Commuter - One who spends his life in riding to and from his wife a man who shaves and takes a train and then rides back to shave again.

Make the work interesting and the discipline will take care of itself.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

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

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 about 19.

Computing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can do the work of one extraordinary man.

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.