Top 300 E.B. White Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education – sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.”

— E.B. White

152. “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

153. “Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp – everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.”

— E.B. White

154. “But what a gamble friendship is.”

— E.B. White

155. “When a man hangs from a tree it doesn’t spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him.”

— E.B. White

156. “A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.”

— E.B. White

157. “The night seemed long. Wilbur’s stomach was empty and his mind was full. And when your stomach is empty and your mind is full, it’s always hard to sleep.”

— E.B. White

158. “America is now liberty-conscious. In a single generation it has progressed from being toothbrush-conscious, to being air-minded, to being liberty-conscious.”

— E.B. White

159. “Books are the door of escape from the forest.”

— E.B. White

160. “All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm. It.”

— E.B. White

161. “No one had ever had such a friend – so affectionate, so loyal, and so skillful.”

— E.B. White

162. “At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream.”

— E.B. White

163. “To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.”

— E.B. White

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

— E.B. White

165. “The theme of ‘Charlotte’s Web’ is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.”

— E.B. White

166. “No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.”

— E.B. White

167. “In every queen there’s a touch of floozy.”

— E.B. White

168. “Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.”

— E.B. White

169. “Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky’s and our Camelot.”

— E.B. White

170. “All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.”

— E.B. White

171. “Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles.”

— E.B. White

172. “Besides, my life is a catastrophe. It’s a catastrophe to be without a voice.”

— E.B. White

173. “Life’s accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up.”

— E.B. White

174. “It is Sunday, mid-morning-Sunday in the living room, Sunday in the kitchen, Sunday in the woodshed, Sunday down the road in the village: I hear the bells, calling me to share God’s grace.”

— E.B. White

175. “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.”

— E.B. White

176. “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

177. “Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be.”

— E.B. White

178. “A writer is like a bean plant – he has his little day, and then gets stringy.”

— E.B. White

179. “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.”

— E.B. White

180. “Dentistry is more impressive in town-what the rural man calls cleaning the teeth is called “prophylaxis” in New York.”

— E.B. White

181. “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

182. “In order to read one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I’ve never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.”

— E.B. White

183. “In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.”

— E.B. White

184. “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.”

— E.B. White

185. “In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech-that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.”

— E.B. White

186. “In the trees the night wind stirs, bringing the leaves to life, endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green branches from the under side, translating them into a new language.”

— E.B. White

187. “The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.”

— E.B. White

188. “I’m glad to report that even now, at this late day, a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me – more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears. I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking, ‘This is where I belong, this is it’.”

— E.B. White

189. “The living language is like a cowpath: 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

190. “Oh, I never look under the hood.”

— E.B. White

191. “I head east along Rivington. All is cheerful and filthy and crowded. Small shops overflow onto the sidewalk, leaving only half the normal width for passers-by.”

— E.B. White

192. “A schoolchild should be taught grammar – for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.”

— E.B. White

193. “Even now; with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt. I still feel a memorial chill on casting off.”

— E.B. White

194. “Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.”

— E.B. White

195. “A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist – nothing shields him from the world’s gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.”

— E.B. White

196. “Not even a collapsing world looks dark to a man who is about to make his fortune.”

— E.B. White

197. “To confront death, in any guise, is to identify with the victim and face what is unsettling and sobering.”

— E.B. White

198. “I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life’s more stereotyped roles.”

— E.B. White

199. “When snow accumulates week after week, month after month, it works curious miracles.”

— E.B. White

200. “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