Famous Quotes

Quotes by E B White

• Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
• Be obscure clearly.
• Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
• English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.
• Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
• Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
• I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
• I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.
• 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.
• It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
• Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
• 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.
• Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.
• The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.
• The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance.
• The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
• To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.
• Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.
• 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.
• Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
• Writing is hard work and bad for the health.