No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.
E. B. WHITENo one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
More E. B. White Quotes
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No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.
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Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
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In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.
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Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.
E. B. WHITE -
The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.
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When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.
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I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.
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One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
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It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
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I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
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There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter.
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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.
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I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. “Never worry about your heart till it stops beating.
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Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.
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I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they
E. B. WHITE -
It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck.
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Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays
E. B. WHITE -
A schoolchild should be taught grammar-for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.
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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.
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Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one’s belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote.
E. B. WHITE -
I get up every morning determined to both change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes, this makes planning the day difficult.
E. B. WHITE -
A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.
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People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.
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I have noticed that most men when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wanderings, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended.
E. B. WHITE -
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
E. B. WHITE