Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
E. B. White
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
E. B. White
Age: 86 †
Born: 1899
Born: July 11
Died: 1985
Died: October 1
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Mount Vernon
New York
Elwyn Brooks White
E.B. White
Plans
World
Morning
Seductive
Enjoy
Torn
Desire
Uncertainty
Makes
Improve
Planning
Hard
Arise
Time
Plan
Life
More quotes by E. B. White
It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
E. B. White
There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.
E. B. White
Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.
E. B. White
Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.
E. B. White
I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.
E. B. White
Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp - everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.
E. B. White
When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.
E. B. White
Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.
E. B. White
A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false lively, not dull accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
E. B. White
Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.
E. B. White
From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.
E. B. White
The vision of milk and honey, it comes and goes. But the odor of cooking goes on forever.
E. B. White
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. B. White
I can still see my first dog. For six years he met me at the same place after school and convoyed me home - a service he thought up himself. A boy doesn't forget that sort of association.
E. B. White
Not even a collapsing world looks dark to a man who is about to make his fortune.
E. B. White
I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.
E. B. White
Half a man's life is devoted to what he calls improvements, yet the original had some quality which is lost in the process.
E. B. White
Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
E. B. White
Advice to young writers wo want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.
E. B. White
New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory season yielded more birds than I ever saw in Maine.
E. B. White
