Great Throughts Treasury

"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. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly. ... Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words and they backhand them across the net."

"Are my stories true, you ask? No, they are imaginary tales ? But real life is only one kind of life ? there is also the life of the imagination."

"As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost."

"As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left us in a bad time."

"As everyone knows, there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying"

"As for business, we agree that it is a hard, cold-blooded game. Survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. The fact that about eighty-five per cent of the dogs have recently been eaten by the other dogs perhaps explains what long ago we noticed about business: that it had a strong smell of boloney. If dog continues to eat dog, there will be only one dog left, and he will be sick to his stomach."

"Before the seed there comes the thought of bloom."

"But we have received a sign, Edith - a mysterious sign. A miracle has happened on this farm... in the middle of the web there were the words 'Some Pig'... we have no ordinary pig. Well, said Mrs. Zuckerman, it seems to me you're a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider."

"But what a gamble friendship is."

"Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book."

"Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand."

"But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to change the world and a desire to enjoy the world."

"Before you can be an internationalist you have first to be a naturalist and feel the ground under you making a whole circle. It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members. A club, moreover, or a nation, has a most attractive offer to make: it offers the right to be exclusive. There are not many of us who are physically constituted to resist this strange delight, this nourishing privilege. It is at the bottom of all fraternities, societies, orders. It is at the bottom of most trouble. The planet holds out no such inducement. The planet is everybody's. All it offers is the grass, the sky, the water, the ineluctable dream of peace and fruition."

"But I believe it is also true that a government committed to the policy of improving the nation by improving the condition of some of the individuals will eventually run into trouble in attempting to distinguish between a national good and a chocolate sundae? I think that one hazard of the benefit form of government is the likelihood that there will be an indefinite extensions of benefits, each new one establishing an easy precedent for the next. Another hazard is that by placing large numbers of people under obligation to their government there will develop a self-perpetuating party capable of supplying itself with a safe majority."

"But I think the Court again heard clearly the simple theme that ennobles our Constitution: that no one shall be made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe because of nonconformity."

"But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin-the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled."

"But real life is only one kind of life?there is also the life of the imagination."

"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."

"By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is uncomfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort and convenience- if they did they would live elsewhere."

"Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly."

"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."

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

"Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer?he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along."

"Commuter ? one who spends his life in riding to and from his wife; a man who shaves and takes a train and then rides back to shave again."

"Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of the morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is."

"Clubs, fraternities, nations -- these are the beloved barriers in the way of a workable world, these will have to surrender some of their rights and some of their ribs. A ?fraternity? is the antithesis of fraternity. The first (that is, the order or organization) is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality. Anyone who remembers back to his fraternity days at college recalls the enthusiasts in his group, the rabid members, both young and old, who were obsessed with the mystical charm of membership in their particular order. They were usually men who were incapable of genuine brotherhood, or at least unaware of its implications. Fraternity begins when the exclusion formula is found to be distasteful. The effect of any organization of a social and brotherly nature is to strengthen rather than diminish the lines which divide people into classes; the effects of states and nations is the same, and eventually these lines will have to be softened, these powers will have to be generalized."

"Computing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can do the work of one extraordinary man."

"Did it ever occur to you that there's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another?"

"Democrats do a lot of bellyaching about the press being preponderantly Republican, which it is. But they don't do the one thing that could correct the situation: they don't go into the publishing business. Democrats say they haven't got that kind of money, but I'm afraid they haven't got that kind of temperament or, perhaps, nerve."

"Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider's web? Oh, no, said Dr. Dorian. I don't understand it. But for that matter I don't understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle. What's miraculous about a spider's web? said Mrs. Arable. I don't see why you say a web is a miracle-it's just a web. Ever try to spin one? asked Dr. Dorian."

"Did you ever hear of the Queensborough Bridge?' Wilbur shook his head. 'Is it a web?' 'Sort of,' replied Charlotte. 'But do you know how long it took men to build it? Eight whole years. My goodness, I would have starved to death waiting that long. I can make a web in a single evening.' 'What do people catch in the Queensborough Bridge?bugs?' asked Wilbur. 'No,' said Charlotte. 'They don?t catch anything. They just keep trotting back and forth across the bridge thinking there is something better on the other side. If they?d hang head-down at the top of the thing and wait quietly, maybe something good would come along. But no?with men it?s rush, rush, rush, every minute. I?m glad I?m a sedentary spider."

"Don't write about Man; write about a man."

"During which time I have experienced the satisfactions of working the land, building the soil, and making brown into green, I am beginning to believe that our new world that will open up after the war should be constructed round a repopulated rural America, so that a reasonably large proportion of the population shall participate in the culture of the earth. The trend is often in the opposite direction, even in peace. As things are now in America, country living is possible only for those who have either the talents and instincts of a true farmer or the means to live wherever they choose."

"Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp - everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs."

"Each delegate brought the flag of his homeland with him-each, that is, except the delegate from China. When the others asked him why he had failed to bring a flag, he said that he had discussed the matter with another Chinese survivor, an ancient and very wise man, and that between them they had concluded that they would not have any cloth flag for China anymore. 'What kind of flag do you intend to have?' asked the delegate from Luxembourg. The Chinese delegate blinked his eyes and produced a shoebox, from which he drew a living flower which looked very like an iris. 'What is that?' they all inquired, pleased with the sight of so delicate a symbol. 'That,' said the Chinese, 'is a wild flag, Iris tectorum. In China we have decided to adopt this flag, since it is a convenient and universal device and very beautiful and grows everywhere in the moist places of the earth for all to observe and wonder at. I propose all countries adopt it, so that it will be impossible for us to insult each other's flag.'"

"Ever since the spider had befriended him, he had done his best to live up to his reputation. When Charlotte?s web said SOME PIG, Wilbur had tried hard to look like some pig. When Charlotte?s web said TERRIFIC, Wilbur had tried to look terrific. And now that the web said RADIANT, he did everything possible to make himself glow."

"English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street."

"Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn't. And everybody is always somewhere else."

"Everything gets taken over by big business, I don?t care what line you?re in."

"Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process."

"Everything in life is somewhere else and you get there in a car."

"Flammable. An oddity, chiefly useful in saving lives. The common word meaning combustible is inflammable. But some people are thrown off by the in- and think inflammable means not combustible. For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE. Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable."

"Fern was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice. As a result, she now has a pig. A small one to be sure, but nevertheless a pig. It just shows what can happen if a person gets out of bed promptly."

"From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting. . . . On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain."

"Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one."

"Geese are friends to no one, they bad mouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false accusations."

"From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive."

"Gloomily. He was sad because his new friend was so bloodthirsty. Yes,"

"Got into the web. I don?t understand it, and"

"Good things come to those who find it and shove it in their mouth!"