"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world."
Also featured in: Good Morning Quotes
Also featured in: Good Morning Quotes
Similar Quotes by E.B. White Quotes
"Where I would like to discover facts, I find fancy. Where I would like to learn what I did, I learn only what I was thinking. They are loaded with opinion, moral thoughts, quick evaluations, youthful hopes and cares and sorrows. Occasionally they manage to report something in exquisite honesty and accuracy. That is why I have refrained from burning them."
"I fell in love with the sound of an early typewriter and I have been stuck with it ever since."
"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."
"It seemed to me that I should have a desk, even though I had no real need for a desk. I was afraid that if I had no desk in my room my life would seem too haphazard."
"I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat."
"Perhaps success in the future will depend partly on our ability to generate cheap power, but I think it will depend to a greater extent on our ability to resist a technological formula that is sterile: peas without pageantry, corn without coon, knowledge without wisdom, kitchens without a warm stove. There is more to these rocks than uranium; there is the lichen on the rock, the smell of the fern whose feet are upon the rock, the view from the rock. Last."
"One morning when the wind was blowing from the West, Stuart put on his sailor suit and his sailor hat, took his spyglass down from the shelf, and set out for a walk, full of the joy of life and the fear of dogs."
"The grave in the woods is unmarked, but Fred can direct the mourner to it unerringly and with immense good will, and I know he and I shall often revisit it, singly and together, in seasons of reflection and despair, on flagless memorial days of our own choosing."
"Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject."
"When I am composed I feel no need of affiliating myself with anybody. There is a lot of the cat in me, and cats are not joiners."
"I wanted no interruption in the regularity of feeding, the steadiness of growth, the even succession of days. I wanted no interruption, wanted no oil, no deviation."
"The value of the liberal in the republic is not that he is logical but that he is inquisitive."
"Some day people will put faith in poets, who saw things centuries ago in perfect clarity."
"As for business, we agree that it is a hard, cold-blooded game. Survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. The fact that about eighty-five per cent of the dogs have recently been eaten by the other dogs perhaps explains what long ago we noticed about business: that it had a strong smell of boloney. If dog continues to eat dog, there will be only one dog left, and he will be sick to his stomach."
"So complete is each neighborhood, and so strong the sense of neighborhood, that many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines of an area smaller than a country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land and will feel uneasy till he gets back."
"Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down."
"Some of the best writings of writers, it seems to us, were done before they actually thought of themselves as engaged in producing literature. Some of the best humor of humorists was produced before ever they heard the distant laughter of their multitudes."
"I distrust the slightest hint of a standard for political rectitude, knowing that it will open the way for persons in authority to set arbitrary standards of human behavior."
"As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading-the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication."
"Some of the published news was distorted, but distortion is inherent in partisan journalism, the same as it is in political rallies."
"As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost."
"Computing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can do the work of one extraordinary man."
"People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust."
"Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor."
"There is nothing so expensive, really, as a big, well-developed, full-bodied preconception."
"Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living."
"But I think the Court again heard clearly the simple theme that ennobles our Constitution: that no one shall be made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe because of nonconformity."
"The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it."
"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."
"Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?"
"Wilbur never forgot Charlotte… She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes a long who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both."
"The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler."
"And the fan takes over again, and the heat and the relaxed air and the memory of so many good little dinners in so many good little illegal places, with the theme of love, the sound of ventilation, the brief medicinal illusion of gin."
"Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention."
"Do not be afraid to seize whatever you have written and cut it to ribbons; it can always be restored to its original condition in the morning… remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is a common occurrence in all writing, and among the best writers."
"Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma."
"Yet in tearing us apart he somehow held us together. In obstructing, he strengthened us. In criticizing, he informed. In his rich, aromatic heresy, he nourished our faith. He was also a plain damned nuisance, I must not forget that."
"In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart."
"A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour."
"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."
"I find the natural world as engaging and as innocent as it ever was. When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed, and I have no complaints."
"Both tend to speak of national security as though it were still capable of being dissociated from universal well-being; in fact, sometimes in these political addresses it sounds as though this nation, or any nation, through force of character or force of arms, could damn well rise above planetary considerations, as though we were greater than our environment, as though the national verve somehow transcended the natural world."
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