1,140 Quotes by E. B. White

PETA operates by getting publicity any way they can. They're comparing chickens to black people?

Life's accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up.

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

My team fought hard. I don't like losing. Everybody can't win all the time.

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.... Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words and they backhand them across the net.

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.

Only by his action can a man make (himself/his life) whole . . . . You are responsible for what you have done and the people whom you have influenced.

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

Be obscure clearly.