Elwyn Brooks White Quotes

266 quotes in 3286 categories

• It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.
• Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.
• Computing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can do the work of one extraordinary…
• From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.
• Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a…
• His words span rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.
• Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays
• Writing is not an exercise in excision, it's a journey into sound.
• Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.
• Wilbur burst into tears. "I dont want to die," he moaned. "I want to stay alive, right here in my comfortable manure pile with all…
• Geese are friends to no one, they bad mouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false…
• An unhatched egg is to me the greatest challenge in life.
• Commuter - one who spends his life In riding to and from his wife; A man who shaves and takes a train And then rides…
• It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun,…
• A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away,…
• As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not…
• All poets who, when reading from their own works,m experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own…
• I have a spaniel that defrocked a nun last week. He took hold of the cord. I had hold of the leash. It was like…
• It isn't silence you can cut with a knife any more, it's interchange of ideas. Intelligent discussion of practically everything is what is breaking up…
• It sometimes takes days, even weeks, before a dog's nerves tire. In the case of terriers it can run into months.

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