Life & Wisdom Quote by E. B. White

Weariness dressed as a barnyard gag: E. B. White sets “literature” beside “chickens” to puncture the grandiosity that so often surrounds writing. The joke works because the pairing is deliberately mismatched in cultural status but matched in daily reality. Chickens are noisy, fragile, prone to chaos; literature is supposed to be noble, elevated, consequential. White’s line quietly insists that both can be, in practice, a grind: you feed them, tend them, worry over them, and still they disappoint you on their own schedule.

The intent isn’t anti-art so much as anti-pretension. White, a New Yorker essayist with a farmer’s suspicion of hot air, enjoyed exposing how much romantic talk obscures the actual labor of making things. “Discouraging” is the key word: not tragic, not futile, just the steady drip of frustration that comes from caring. Writing refuses to behave; so do animals. Each offers small, unpredictable rewards that never fully justify the effort, except that they somehow do.

There’s subtext, too, about audience and outcome. Literature is judged, ignored, misunderstood, published badly, praised for the wrong reasons. Chickens lay (or don’t), get sick, attract predators, make a mess of your plans. By refusing to say which is worse, White implies the discouragement is structural: any pursuit that depends on forces you can’t control - readers, editors, weather, biology - will humble you.

Contextually, it lands in the White worldview: a mid-century American intelligence allergic to self-seriousness, using dry comedy to admit vulnerability without melodrama. The laugh is the coping mechanism; the sentence is the shrug that keeps you working anyway.