I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty—everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?

The theme of 'Charlotte's Web' is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.

It sometimes takes days, even weeks, before a dog's nerves tire. In the case of terriers it can run into months.

Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.

Oh, I never look under the hood.

When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.

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.