Comedy Quotes by E. B. White

9 Comedy quotes by E. B. White

E. B. White’s nine short jokes capture his gentle, observational wit, making for a comforting, brief read.

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Humor is like a frog. You can dissect it to see how it works, but by then, it's dead.

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The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.

E. B. White

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Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any…

E. B. White

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

E. B. White

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Understanding humor is like dissecting a live frog. It can be done, but the frog tends to die in the process.

E. B. White

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Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.

E. B. White

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You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.

E. B. White

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Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.

E. B. White

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Every American, to the last man, lays claim to a "sense" of humor and guards it as his most significant spiritual trait,…

E. B. White

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More by E. B. White

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

E. B. White

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“To hear, in the short space of one week, a Scottish terrier booed by an audience and President Roosevelt criticized by Charles Lindbergh was…

E. B. White

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The sea answers all questions, and always in the same way; for when you read in the papers the interminable discussions and the bickering…

E. B. White

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New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual…

E. B. White

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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…

E. B. White

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When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we…

E. B. White

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Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human…

E. B. White

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Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.

E. B. White

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A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to…

E. B. White

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Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan…

E. B. White

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I seldom went to bed before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen…

E. B. White

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Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

E. B. White

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The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich…

E. B. White

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

E. B. White

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The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review…

E. B. White

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