You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway?
E. B. WHITESafety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
More E. B. White Quotes
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A schoolchild should be taught grammar-for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.
E. B. WHITE -
All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.
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An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
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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.
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You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.
E. B. WHITE -
We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. 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.
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It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention.
E. B. WHITE -
Nauseous. Nauseated. The first means “sickening to contemplate”; the second means “sick at the stomach.” Do not, therefore, say “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.
E. B. WHITE -
Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.
E. B. WHITE -
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.
E. B. WHITE -
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.
E. B. WHITE -
Good deeds never go unpunished.
E. B. WHITE -
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
E. B. WHITE -
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
E. B. WHITE -
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
E. B. WHITE