410 Quotes by E.B. White

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte... She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes a long who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

And the fan takes over again, and the heat and the relaxed air and the memory of so many good little dinners in so many good little illegal places, with the theme of love, the sound of ventilation, the brief medicinal illusion of gin.

Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

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

As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading-the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.

As for business, we agree that it is a hard, cold-blooded game. Survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. The fact that about eighty-five per cent of the dogs have recently been eaten by the other dogs perhaps explains what long ago we noticed about business: that it had a strong smell of boloney. If dog continues to eat dog, there will be only one dog left, and he will be sick to his stomach.

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

I’m really too young to go out into the world alone,” he thought as he lay down.

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