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Top EB White Quotes

Browse top 98 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by EB White.

Favorite EB White Quotes

1. "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." ~ E.B. White
2. "Never hurry and never worry."-Charlotte" ~ E.B. White
3. "It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky." ~ E.B. White
4. "Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed." ~ E.B. White
5. "The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war." ~ E.B. White
6. "Too many things on my mind, said Wilbur.Well, said the goose, that's not my trouble. I have nothing at all on my mind, but I've too many things under my behind." ~ E.B. White
7. "Fern was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice. As a result, she now has a pig. A small one to be sure, but nevertheless a pig. It just shows what can happen if a person gets out of bed promptly." ~ E.B. White
8. "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." ~ E.B. White
9. "The young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound." ~ E.B. White
10. "To achieve style, begin by affecting none." ~ E.B. White
11. "Wilbur didn't want food, he wanted love." ~ E.B. White
12. "And then, just as Wilbur was settling down for his morning nap, he heard again the thin voice that had addressed him the night before."Salutations!" said the voice.Wilbur jumped to his feet. "Salu-what?" he cried."Salutations!" repeated the voice."What are they, and where are you?" screamed Wilbur. "Please, please, tell me where you are. And what are salutations?""Salutations are greetings," said the voice. "When I say 'salutations,' it's just my fancy way of saying hello or good morning." ~ E.B. White
13. "The living language is like a cow-path: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay." ~ E.B. White
14. "A book is a sneeze." ~ E.B. White
15. "In the loveliest town of all where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla." ~ E.B. White
16. "Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place." ~ E.B. White
17. "All writing is both a mask and an unveiling." ~ E.B. White
18. "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." ~ E.B. White
19. "I find this morning that what I most vividly and longingly recall is the sight of my grandson and his little sunburnt sister returning to their kitchen door from an excursion, with trophies of the meadow clutched in their hands—she with a couple of violets, and smiling, he serious and holding dandelions, strangling them in a responsible grip. Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists—just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts." ~ E.B. White
20. "I haven't told why I wrote the book, but I haven't told you why I sneeze, either. A book is a sneeze." ~ E.B. White
21. "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it." ~ E.B. White
22. "Templeton was down there now, rummaging around. When he returned to the barn, he carried in his mouth an advertisement he had torn from a crumpled magazine. How's this?" he asked, showing the ad to Charlotte.It says 'Crunchy.' 'Crunchy' would be a good word to write in your web."Just the wrong idea," replied Charlotte. "Couldn't be worse. We don't want Zuckerman to think Wilbur is crunchy. He might start thinking about crisp, crunchy bacon and tasty ham. That would put ideas into his head. We must advertise Wilbur's noble qualities, not his tastiness." ~ E.B. White
23. "The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation's pulse, you can't be sure that the nation hasn't just run up a flight of stairs, and although you can take a nation's blood pressure, you can't be sure that if you came back in twenty minutes you'd get the same reading. This is a damn fine thing." ~ E.B. White
24. "Once in everyone's life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half-asleep." ~ E.B. White
25. "[Writers] should tend to lift people up, not lower them down." ~ E.B. White
26. "I am working on a new book about a boa constrictor and a litter of hyenas. The boa constrictor swallows the babies one by one, and the mother hyena dies laughing." ~ E.B. White
27. "Life's accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up." ~ E.B. White
28. "But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin-the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled. . . ." ~ E.B. White
29. "Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died." ~ E.B. White
30. "It is a miracle that New York ?works at all. The whole thing is ?implausible." ~ E.B. White
31. "Walk the Bowery under the El at night and all you feel is a sort of cold guilt. Touched for a dime, you try to drop the coin and not touch the hand, because the hand is dirty; you try to avoid the glance, because the glance accuses. This is not so much personal menace as universal — the cold menace of unresolved human suffering and poverty and the advanced stages of the disease alcoholism." ~ E.B. White
32. "Winter will pass, the days will lengthen, the ice will melt in the pasture pond. The song sparrow will return and sing, the frogs will awake, the warm wind will blow again. All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur—this lovely world, these precious days…" ~ E.B. White
33. "When we slid the body into the grave, we both were shaken to the core. The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig." ~ E.B. White
34. "Your essays spoke of beauty, of love, of light and darkness, of joy and sorrow, and of the goodness of life. They were wonderful compositions. I have seldom read any that have touched me more.To thank you and your teacher Mrs. Ellis, I am sending you what I think is one of the most beautiful and miraculous things in the world—an egg. I have a goose named Felicity and she lays about forty eggs every spring. It takes her almost three months to accomplish this. Each egg is a perfect thing. I am mailing you one of Felicity's eggs. The insides have been removed—blown out—so the egg should last forever. I hope you will enjoy seeing this great egg and loving it. Thank you for sending me your essays about being somebody. I was pleased that so many of you felt the beauty and goodness of the world. If we feel that when we are young, then there is great hope for us when we grow older." ~ E.B. White
35. "Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays." ~ E.B. White
36. "So I told [the doctor] about my hay fever, which used to rage just in summertime but now simmers the year round, and he listened listlessly as though it were a cock and bull story; and we sat there for a few minutes and neither of us was interested in the other's nose, but after a while he poked a little swab up mine and made a smear on a glass slide and his assistant put it under the microscope and found two cells which delighted him and electrified the whole office, the cells being characteristic of a highly allergic system. The doctor's manner changed instantly and he was full of the enthusiasm of discovery and was as proud of the two little cells as though they were his own." ~ E.B. White
37. "To hear, in the short space of one week, a Scottish terrier booed by an audience and President Roosevelt criticized by Charles Lindbergh was a great strain on our nerves. The props of life seem to be crumbling fast." ~ E.B. White
38. "By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is unconfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers tempramentally do not crave comfort and convenience - if they did they would live elsewhere." ~ E.B. White
39. "A writer's style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacites, his bias...it is the Self escaping into the open." ~ E.B. White
40. "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process." ~ E.B. White
41. "Don't write about Man; write about a man." ~ E.B. White
42. "I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially." ~ E.B. White
43. "The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change." ~ E.B. White
44. "Children almost always hand onto things tighter than their parents think they will." ~ E.B. White
45. "...Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don't in don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the peopleare right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths,the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee." ~ E.B. White
46. "new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing." ~ E.B. White
47. "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." ~ E.B. White
48. "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." ~ E.B. White
49. "Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college." ~ E.B. White
50. "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." ~ E.B. White
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A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself."
Author: Arthur Miller

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Ear
Thin
Hen
Here
Wit
Lit
Per
End
Ten
Con
Son
Hey
Low
Die
Sure
Use
Tan
She
Pen
City
Word
Thou
Writing
Less
York
Air
Ring
Year
Old
Though
Turn
Hear
Mind
Body
Boo
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Win
Small
Self
Said
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Hum
Full
Place
Light
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King
Past
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