Quotes by E. B. White

"There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another."

"I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens."

"The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people."

"There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement."

"Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men."

"Be obscure clearly."

"A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus."

"To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year."

"I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel."

"Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car."

"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."

"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."

"The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind."

"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."

"Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor."

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."

"Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time."

"Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts."

"Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim."

"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 only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it."

"Writing is hard work and bad for the health."

"English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street."

"I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat."

"Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar."

"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."

"The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war."

"It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer."

"Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one."