Quotes by E. White

• The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
• Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.
• The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.
• 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 of his acceptance.
• The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
• The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.
• The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.
• There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.
• There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.
• Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.
• We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.
• One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
• When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.
• Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
• Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
• To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.
• A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
• The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.
• A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
• Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
• All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of the weather who walks bent over on wet days.
• Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
• Be obscure clearly.
• Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
• Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
• English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.
• Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
• I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
• I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.
• I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.
• I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.
• I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
• It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members.
• It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
• Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.