Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Making
Wild
Resist
Living
Pursuit
Idle
Jobs
Tasks
Belongs
Anything
Embrace
Favor
Live
Side
Excitement
Country
Full
Favors
Immediacy
Time
Sides
Task
Pushed
Beauty
Variety
Powerless

More quotes by E. B. White

Image
Life is always rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.
E. B. White
Image
Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.
E. B. White
Image
By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
E. B. White
Image
Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.
E. B. White
Image
Have you ever found anything that gives you relief? Yes. A drink.
E. B. White
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Good deeds never go unpunished.
E. B. White
Image
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.
E. B. White
Image
If I can fool a bug... I can surely fool a man. People are not as smart as bugs.
E. B. White
Image
A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.
E. B. White
Image
Diplomacy is the lowest form of politeness because it misquotes the greatest number of people. A nation, like an individual, if it has anything to say, should simply say it.
E. B. White
Image
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
Image
Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
E. B. White
Image
By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is unconfortable and inconvenient but New Yorkers tempramentally do not crave comfort and convenience - if they did they would live elsewhere.
E. B. White
Image
The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.
E. B. White
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
E. B. White
Image
Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.
E. B. White