1899-1985, American Author, Editor
A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Politicians and Politics]
A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Farming and Farmers]
A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself. Yet our country, seen through the mists of smog, is curiously lovable, in somewhat the way an individual who has got himself into an unconscionable scrape seems lovable — or at least deserving of support.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [America]
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.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Letters]
A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood — a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Generations]
A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Poetry and Poets]
Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams — Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Advertising]
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.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Weather]
Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Principles]
Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Grammar]
Commuter — one who spends his life in riding to and from his wife; And man who shaves and takes a train, and then rides back to shave again.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Commuters]
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Commuters]
Deathlessness should be arrived at in a… haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Immortality]
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Democracy]
Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Automobiles]
Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Architecture]
I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Anger]
In a sense the world dies every time a writer dies, because, if he is any good, he has been a wet nurse to humanity during his entire existence and has held earth close around him, like the little obstetrical toad that goes about with a cluster of eggs attached to his legs.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Writers and Writing]
In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Age and Aging]
It is at a fair that man can be drunk forever on liquor, love, or fights; at a fair that your front pocket can be picked by a trotting horse looking for sugar, and your hind pocket by a thief looking for his fortune.
E(lwyn) B(rooks) White – [Festivals]