Top 25 E. B. White Quotes

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn’t have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.

When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.

I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.

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

All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of the weather who walks bent over on wet days.

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.

Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

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.

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

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

We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

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.

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

I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.

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

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

There’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education – sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.

Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.

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