Elwyn Brooks White Quotes

266 quotes in 3286 categories

• The South is the land of the sustained sibilant. Everywhere, for the appreciative visitor, the letter "s" insinuates itself in the scene: in the sound… Appreciative
• 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 and… Annual
• The vision of milk and honey, it comes and goes. But the odor of cooking goes on forever. Cooking
• The circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show… All
• Dentistry is more impressive in town-what the rural man calls cleaning the teeth is called "prophylaxis" in New York. Called
• Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America? America
• Familiarity is the thing-the sense of belonging. It grants exemption from all evil, all shabbiness. All
• In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart. Age
• The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts. Artist
• Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits; it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men. Bounds
• Much of our adult morality, in books and out of them, has a stuffiness unworthy of childhood. Our grown-up conclusions often rest on perilously soft… Adult
• The H-bomb rather favors small nations that doesn't as yet possess it; they feel slightly more free to jostle other nations, having discovered that a… Bomb
• It seemed to me that I should have a desk, even though I had no real need for a desk. I was afraid that if… Afraid
• Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists-just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts. Brown
• Extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life's dubious problems are dropped in favor of… Alive
• It is Sunday, mid-morning-Sunday in the living room, Sunday in the kitchen, Sunday in the woodshed, Sunday down the road in the village: I hear… Bells
• I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by… Asleep
• In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of… Any
• The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. Belief
• A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be… Absorbs

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