Top 300 E.B. White Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It is deeply satisfying to win a prize in front of a lot of people.”

— E.B. White

52. “Loneliness is a strange gift.”

— E.B. White

53. “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.”

— E.B. White

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

— E.B. White

55. “Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.”

— E.B. White

56. “You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.”

— E.B. White

57. “You have been my friends. That in itself is a tremendous thing.”

— E.B. White

58. “Writing is not an exercise in excision, it’s a journey into sound.”

— E.B. White

59. “I always write a thing first and think about it afterward, which is not a bad procedure because the easiest way to have consequential thoughts is to start putting them down.”

— E.B. White

60. “In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.”

— E.B. White

61. “The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.”

— E.B. White

62. “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

63. “Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.”

— E.B. White

64. “His words span rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.”

— E.B. White

65. “To achieve style, begin by affecting none.”

— E.B. White

66. “Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.”

— E.B. White

67. “A writer should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.”

— E.B. White

68. “I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.”

— E.B. White

69. “An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.”

— E.B. White

70. “THE BARN was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell – as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world.”

— E.B. White

71. “By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

— E.B. White

72. “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.”

— E.B. White

73. “I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.”

— E.B. White

74. “I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.”

— E.B. White

75. “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?”

— E.B. White

76. “Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time.”

— E.B. White

77. “The world is a wonderful place when you’re young.”

— E.B. White

78. “Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

— E.B. White

79. “One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.”

— E.B. White

80. “A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can’t get it by breeding for it, and you can’t buy it with money. It just happens along.”

— E.B. White

81. “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 clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.”

— E.B. White

82. “Writing is hard work and bad for the health.”

— E.B. White

83. “Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn’t need to take anybody else’s temperature to know where he is going.”

— E.B. White

84. “Use the smallest word that does the job.”

— E.B. White

85. “Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.”

— E.B. White

86. “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!”

— E.B. White

87. “It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.”

— E.B. White

88. “To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year. “The Distant Music of the Hounds,” 1954.”

— E.B. White

89. “Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.”

— E.B. White

90. “Einstein is loved because he is gentle, respected because he is wise. Relativity being not for most of us, we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison, who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the hope of penetrating it.”

— E.B. White

91. “I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend – to make flights, carrying others along if you can manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit.”

— E.B. White

92. “From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.”

— E.B. White

93. “Wherever the wind takes us. High, low. Near, far. East, west. North, south. We take to the breeze, we go as we please.”

— E.B. White

94. “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

95. “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

96. “I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen.”

— E.B. White

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

— E.B. White

98. “We take to the breeze, we go as we please.”

— E.B. White

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

— E.B. White

100. “Life’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.”

— E.B. White