E. B. White: Trending quotes (page 3)

“Did it ever occur to you that there's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another?”

E. B. White

"Quo Vadimus?" http://books.google.com/books?id=vvEvAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Did+it+ever+occur+to+you+that+there's+no+limit+to+how+complicated+things+can+get+on+account+of+one+thing+always+leading+to+another%22&pg=PA34#v=onepage, The Adelphi (January 1930)

“An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.”

E. B. White

Letter to Shirley Wiley (30 March 1954), in The Letters of E. B. White (1989), p. 391

Personality

“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”

E. B. White book Charlotte's Web

Charlotte's Web, last lines

“In order to read one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I've never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.”

E. B. White

Paris Review interview (1969)

Books , Reading

“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.”

E. B. White

Letter to the New York Herald Tribune (29 November 1947)

Health , Reading , Loyalty

“Ideally, a book of letters should be published posthumously. The advantages are obvious: the editor enjoys a free hand, and the author enjoys a perfect hiding place — the grave, where he is impervious to embarrassments and beyond the reach of libel. I have failed to cooperate with this ideal arrangement. Through some typical bit of mismanagement, I am still alive, and the book has had to adjust to that awkward fact.”

E. B. White

Foreword to Letters of E.B. White, edited Dorothy Lobrano Guth (1976)

Books , Perfection

“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.”

E. B. White

"Removal" (July 1938)
One Man's Meat (1942)

Forgetting

“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.”

E. B. White

Letter to M. Nadeau (30 March 1973)

Hope , Time

“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 (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

E. B. White

Quoted in profile by Israel Shenker, "E. B. White: Notes and Comment by Author" http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/08/03/lifetimes/white-notes.html, The New York Times (11 July 1969)

World , Problem

“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.”

E. B. White

"Coon Tree," The New Yorker (14 June 1956), The Points of My Compass: Letters from the East, the West, the North, the South (1962); reprinted in Essays of E.B. White (1977)

Feeling , Nature , Time , Future

“I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure.”

E. B. White

Letter to Stanley Hart White (January 1929)

Truth

“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.”

E. B. White

"How to Tell a Major Poet from a Minor Poet" in The New Yorker (1938); reprinted in Quo Vadimus: Or, the Case for the Bicycle (1939)

Feeling , Reading

“Commuter — one who spends his life
In riding to and from his wife;
A man who shaves and takes a train
And then rides back to shave again.”

E. B. White

"Commuter," The Lady Is Cold (1929)