Elwyn Brooks White Quotes

266 quotes in 3286 categories

• I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.
• I get up every morning determined to both change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes, this makes planning the…
• A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.
• Loneliness is a strange gift.
• Life is always rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.
• In a man's middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.
• A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can't get it by breeding for it, and you can't buy it with…
• Diplomacy is the lowest form of politeness because it misquotes the greatest number of people. A nation, like an individual, if it has anything to…
• Not even a collapsing world looks dark to a man who is about to make his fortune.
• Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of…
• We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. . . . The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world,…
• Write about it by day and dream about it by night.
• Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your…
• I can still see my first dog. For six years he met me at the same place after school and convoyed me home - a…
• There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to…
• Use the smallest word that does the job.
• In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech-that is,…
• I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend - to make flights, carrying others along if you can manage…
• A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library…
• The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it…

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