E.B. White Quotes

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. 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. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

Besides, my life is a catastrophe. It's a catastrophe to be without a voice.

I have seldom met an individual of literary tastes or propensities in whom the writing of love was not directly attributable to the love of writing.

A person of this sort falls terribly in love, but in the end it turns out that he is more bemused by a sheet of white paper than a sheet of white bed linen. He would rather leap into print with his lady than leap into bed with her. (This first pleases the lady and then annoys her. She wants him to do both, and with virtually the same impulse.)

It is by all odds the loftiest of cities. It even managed to reach the highest point in the sky at the lowest moment of the depression.

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

Actually the city editor was one of the gentlest, most soft-spoken men I have ever encountered, and he did me a service I have always been grateful for. I got stuck one day on a story and finally, with the desperation of youth, I took my problem to him, although it seemed cheeky to bother him. How was I to express a certain thing? … I asked him how I could get around my difficulty.

He thought for a minute. Then he said, ‘Just say the words’.

But I think the Court again heard clearly the simple theme that ennobles our Constitution: that no one shall be made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe because of nonconformity.

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

In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation–a shift in weather, perhaps, or something arriving in the mail. But in New York the chances are endless.

The value of the liberal in the republic is not that he is logical but that he is inquisitive.

A mistake is simply another way of doing things.

There is another sort of day which needs celebrating in song — the day of days when spring at last holds up her face to be kissed, deliberate and unabashed. On that day no wind blows either in the hills or in the mind.

New York is the concentrate of art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance, bringing to a single compact arena the gladiator, the evangelist, the promoter, the actor, the trader and the merchant. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

A SPIDER’S web is stronger than it looks. Although it is made of thin, delicate strands, the web is not easily broken. However, a web gets torn every day by the insects that kick around in it, and a spider must rebuild it when it gets full of holes.

[This story] would seem to be for children, but I'm not fussy who reads it.