Life & Wisdom Quote by E. B. White

E. B. White’s line smuggles a whole philosophy into an offhand shrug. It reads like a neighborly observation, but it’s really a quiet rebuke to the fantasy that life is ever neatly containable. The key move is the phrase “on account of”: a folksy bit of causality that makes complexity feel less like a mystery than an inevitability. Not tragedy, not chaos for its own sake - just chain reactions, the everyday physics of consequences.

White’s intent isn’t to dramatize complication; it’s to normalize it. The sentence’s rhythm mirrors the point: it keeps going, clauses tugging the reader forward the way “one thing” tugs on another. There’s a gentle comedy in that modest wording, too. “No limit” is cosmic, but the reason is almost embarrassingly small: stuff happens, then more stuff happens. That mismatch is where the wit lives. It’s not cynicism, exactly; it’s an anti-romantic realism that refuses to pretend any problem stays single-issue once it meets real humans.

Context matters with White: the essayist who watched modernity accelerate, and the children’s author who understood systems (barns, cities, friendships, farms) as webs. In the mid-20th century - bureaucracy thickening, technology multiplying choices, war and media compressing distance - “complicated” stops being a personal failing and becomes the condition of being alive. The subtext is permission: if your life feels tangled, that’s not because you’re doing it wrong. That’s because the world is built on sequels.