E. B. White Quotes About Children

Quotes about: Children

• When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.

  E. B. White

  Inspirational, Happiness, Happy

• Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

  E. B. White

  Children, True Friend, Life Changing

  Charlotte'sWeb ch. 22 (1952)

• Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.... Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words and they backhand them across the net.

  E. B. White

  Children, Writing, Games

• A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood - a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.

  E. B. White

  Running, Children, Sadness

• Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will.

  E. B. White

  Children, Thinking, Parent

• Mother: It's broccoli, dear. ---
  Child: I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it.

  E. B. White

  Mother, Children, Hell

  Cartoon caption, New Yorker, 8 Dec. 1928

• Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists-just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts.

  E. B. White

  Children, Spring, Heart

  E. B. White (2014). “Essays of E. B. White”, p.17, Harper Collins

• Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

  E. B. White

  Art, Children, Writing

  1961 In the New Yorker, 11 Nov. Tribute to James Thurber.

• A schoolchild should be taught grammar - for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.

  E. B. White

  Children, Writing, Way

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.120, Cornell University Press

• 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.

  E. B. White

  Children, Hard Times, Games

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

• Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.

  E. B. White

  Children, Writing

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