Home › Authors › E. B. White
E. B. White Quotes
1899–1985 United States
Elwyn Brooks White (July 11, 1899 – October 1, 1985) was an American essayist, columnist, poet and editor. He is best known today for his work in a writers' guide, The Elements of Style, and for three children's books Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan generally regarded as classics.
United States Columnists Editors Essayists Journalists Also known as: E.B. White, White, E. B., White, Elwyn Brooks
Random E. B. White quote
50 quotes
Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same.
Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn't. And everybody is always somewhere else.
The Door (1939)
An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year.
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
The planet holds out no such inducement. The planet is everybody's. All it offers is the grass, the sky, the water, the ineluctable dream of peace and fruition.
One Man's Meat (1942)
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 desolate. Hope is the one thing left to us in a bad time.
All poets who, when reading from their own works, experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.
An unhatched egg is to me the greatest challenge in life.
Commuter — one who spends his life
I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles.
A great deal of writing is not "plotted"—most of my essays have no plot structure, they are a ramble in the woods, or a ramble in the basement of my mind.
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 loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.
Government is the thing. Law is the thing.
Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.
Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.
One Man's Meat (1942)
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.
Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time.
Paris Review interview (1969)
When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring
One Man's Meat (1942)
Topics E. B. White is quoted on
Works