E. B. White

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 critic leaves at curtain fall To find in starting to review it He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.

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

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

One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.

A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day and then gets stringy.

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

Be obscure clearly.

We should all do what in the long run gives us joy even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

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

The world organization debates disarmament in one room and in the next room moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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