410 Quotes by E.B. White

Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don’t have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.

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

I can still see my first dog. For six years he met me at the same place after school and convoyed me home – a service he thought up himself. A boy doesn’t forget that sort of association.

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.

It’s been fifteen years since we last wintered in this house. Settling in again to live steadily right around the year, as we used to do, has been full of excitement and the sense of our changed condition.

Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print.

He wiped his face with his handkerchief, for he was quite warm from the exertion of being Chairman of the World. It had taken more running and leaping and sliding than he had imagined.

In every queen there’s a touch of floozy.

The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.