E.B. White Quotes

I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty — everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?

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.

You goin’ to get your deer?“ I am asked by every man I meet — and they all wait for an answer. My deer-slaying program is a matter of considerable local concern, much to my surprise. It is plain that I now reside in a friendly community of killers, and that until I open fire myself they cannot call me brother.

Both tend to speak of national security as though it were still capable of being dissociated from universal well-being; in fact, sometimes in these political addresses it sounds as though this nation, or any nation, through force of character or force of arms, could damn well rise above planetary considerations, as though we were greater than our environment, as though the national verve somehow transcended the natural world.

I don't know why people feel unhappy when the curve of a graph fails to keep going up, but they do. Even when we find something we'd like to reduce, such as highway fatalities, it doesn't always sound as though we had our heart in it.

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

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last — the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.

New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up

when your stomach is empty and your mind is full, it’s always hard to sleep.

The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything.

child was left out in the cold, bearing the stigma of being different. It is this one child that our Constitution is concerned about — his tranquillity, his health, his safety, his conscience. What a kindly old document it is, and how brightly it shines, through interpretation after interpretation!

Everything gets taken over by big business, I don’t care what line you’re in.

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. 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.

"I'm really too young to go out into the world alone," he thought as he lay down

Don't write about Man; write about a man.