E. B. White Quotes About New York

• It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

  →

  E. B. White

  E.B. White (2011). “Here is New York”, p.19, New York Review of Books

  2871

• It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.

  →

  E. B. White

  317

• The siren south is well enough, but New York, at the beginning of March, is a hoyden we would not care to miss--a drafty wench, her temperature up and down, full of bold promises and dust in the eye.

  →

  E. B. White

  4930

• 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.

  →

  E. B. White

  E.B. White (2011). “Here is New York”, p.22, New York Review of Books

  2082

• The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)

  →

  E. B. White

  Here Is New York (1949)

  4549

• new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.

  →

  E. B. White

  E.B. White (2011). “Here is New York”, p.38, New York Review of Books

  3309

• New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory season yielded more birds than I ever saw in Maine.

  →

  E. B. White

  Interview with George Plimpton and Frank Crowther for The Paris Review (1969); later published in "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews", Series eight, 1988.

  4906

• Dentistry is more impressive in town-what the rural man calls cleaning the teeth is called "prophylaxis" in New York.

  →

  E. B. White

  454

• A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate millions... Of all targets New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.

  →

  E. B. White

  "Here Is New York". Book by E. B. White, 1948.

  2830

• New York is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village - the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up!

  →

  E. B. White

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.156, Cornell University Press

  5006

• 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.

  →

  E. B. White

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

  3975

You May Also Like:

James Thurber

Laura Ingalls Wilder

William Strunk, Jr.

William Zinsser

Lynne Reid Banks

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Andrew Clements

Louis Sachar