E(lwyn) B(rooks) White

(275 votes)   Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(240 votes)   There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(229 votes)   Advertisers are the interpreters of our dreams -- Joseph interpreting for Pharaoh. Like the movies, they infect the routine futility of our days with purposeful adventure. Their weapons are our weaknesses: fear, ambition, illness, pride, selfishness, desire, ignorance. And these weapons must be kept as bright as a sword.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(135 votes)   Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(135 votes)   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.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(132 votes)   The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man's invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog's way too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(127 votes)   Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(126 votes)   Commuter -- one who spends his life in riding to and from his wife; And man who shaves and takes a train, and then rides back to shave again.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(125 votes)   Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(124 votes)   I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(118 votes)   A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist -- nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix himself up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(117 votes)   The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(106 votes)   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.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

(101 votes)   The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation's pulse, you can't be sure that the nation hasn't just run up a flight of stairs.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website

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

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

Rate this quote: (bad)<> (good)
copy to your blog, myspace, or website