E.B. White, (July 11, 1899 – October 1, 1985)
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, can always fix himself up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation;
in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the
concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York
has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer
might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible
charm.
(From Here is New York, 1949)
Be obscure clearly.
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
His words leap across rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.
Home was quite a place when people stayed there.
Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
Humor plays close to the big, hot fire which is Truth.
I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear.
I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.
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.
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But 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.
In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.
Loneliness is a strange gift.
Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
No man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.
No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.
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.
People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.
Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.
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 the wounds of the poor.
The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for Nature to follow. Now we just set the clock an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.
The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.
We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.
Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.
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