E. B. White

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent
less time proving that he can outwit nature and more time tasting her
sweetness and respecting her seniority.

if the world were merely seductive, that would be easy.
if the world were merely challenging, that would be no problem.
but i arise in the morning torn between a desire to change the world and a desire to enjoy the world.
this makes it very hard to plan the day.

Be obscure clearly.

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes, this makes planning the day difficult.

All poets who, when reading from their own works,m experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.

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 things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

The essayist . . . can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter - philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast.

The future . . . seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done.

We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. . . . The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.