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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. B. White

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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
Forever
Sugar
Hind
Looking
Drunk
Thief
Fighting
Fairs
Liquor
Men
Fair
Fights
Love
Fortune
Pocket
Horse
Thieves
Fronts
Picked
Front
Pockets
Trotting

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Wilbur burst into tears. I dont want to die, he moaned. I want to stay alive, right here in my comfortable manure pile with all my friends. I want to breathe the beautiful air and lie in the beautiful sun.
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Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists-just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts.
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Geese are friends to no one, they bad mouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false accusations.
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Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
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A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.
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Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?
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It sometimes takes days, even weeks, before a dog's nerves tire. In the case of terriers it can run into months.
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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.
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You're terrific as far as I am concerned.
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New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.
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We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.
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The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.
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Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.
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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.
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Life is always rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.
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Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.
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A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.
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Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
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Good deeds never go unpunished.
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A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. 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. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
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