E. B. White

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

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

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

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.

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

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

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

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

There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

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