E. B. White Quotes About Giving

• We are such docile creatures, normally, that it takes a virus to jolt us out of life's routine. A couple of days in a fever bed are, in a sense, health-giving; the change in body temperature, the change in pulse , and the change of scene have a restorative effect on the system equal to the hell they raise.

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  E. B. White

  1941

• 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.

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  E. B. White

  Children   Hard Times   Games  

  "Writers at Work". Interview with George Plimpton and Frank Crowther, Paris Review, 1969.

  2806

• I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure.

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  E. B. White

  E. B. White (1989). “The Letters of E. B. White”, Perennial

  2615

• This is what youth must figure out: Girls, love, and living. The having, the not having, The spending and giving, And the meloncholy time of not knowing. This is what age must learn about: The ABC of dying. The going, yet not going, The loving and leaving, And the unbearable knowing and knowing

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  E. B. White

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.220, Cornell University Press

  4121

• 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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  E. B. White

  E. B. White (1989). “The Letters of E. B. White”, Perennial

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• 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.

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  E. B. White

  439

• ... with men it's rush, rush, rush, every minute. I'm glad I'm a sedentary spider." "What does sedentary mean?" asked Wilbur. "Means I sit still a good part of the time and don't go wandering all over creation. I know a good thing when I see it, and my web is a good thing. I stay put and wait for what comes. Gives me a chance to think.

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  E. B. White

  3756

• "Have you ever found anything that gives you relief?" "Yes. A drink."

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  E. B. White

  "The Second Tree From The Corner".

  573

• Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

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  E. B. White

  E.B. White (2011). “Here is New York”, p.26, New York Review of Books

  320

• The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich and the wounds of the poor.

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  E. B. White

  3261

• There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

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  E. B. White

  "In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers".

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