E.B. White on Raising Chickens: “I sometimes think I am crazy —everybody else fighting and dying or working for a cause or writing to his senator, and me looking after some Barred Rock chickens. But the land, and the creatures that go with it, are what is left that is good, and they are the authors of the book that I find worth reading…” (From his essay ‘Spring’)

E.B. White on Security: “Young people have never bothered much about security, they have traditionally gone after adventure, romance, and derring-do. Now they are holding out their arm for the branding iron, surrendering their free selves to an illusive certainty.” (From “Security”)

E.B. White on Solitaire: “Even in a last extremity, with neither money nor hope, a man seizes a deck of cards and tries to run at solitaire, to restore himself and taste the time of luck.” (From his essay ‘Control’)

E.B. White on Television: “We shall stand or fall by television — of that I am quite sure.” 

[This essay was written in 1938, so TV was obviously quite novel at the time.] 

“Television will… enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images — distant and concocted.” 

[OK, did he have a time machine?]

E.B. White on the Future: “The future, wave or no wave, seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done.” (From ‘Wave of the Future’)

E.B. White on the Little Red School of Yesterday: “…my guess is that the Little Red School of yesterday produced a lower average of intelligence but produced occasional individuals for the very best education there is, namely the knack and the will to seek and gain knowledge independently, without having it spooned out.” (From “Winter Diary”) [That would be me.]

E.B. White on the Problem of Security: “The problem of security is full of bewildering implications, pitfalls, and myths. It is paradoxical that the more secure a person gets in a material way, the less secure he may become in other ways.”

E.B. White on the Sears Catalog: “When you buy something in a store, you see it with your eyes and it has a prosaic and sometimes devastating reality. When you order something from Sears, it exists only in the mind’s eye, sugar-coated, triple-reinforced, and surrounded by an aura of light.” (From “Second World War”)

[This is how much of the first world now regards Amazon, I think.]

E.B. White on the World Being Done For: “I can see God, walking through the garden and noticing the world is done for, reach down and pick it up and put it on his compost pile. It ought to make a fine ferment.” (From his essay ‘My Day’)

E.B. White on Tolerant Men and Compassion: “There would never be a moment, in war or in peace, when I wouldn’t trade all the patriots in the county for one tolerant man. Or when I wouldn’t swap the vitamins in a child’s lunchbox for a jelly glass of compassion.”

E.B. White on Trains: “Railroad trains are such magnificent objects we commonly mistake them for Destiny.”