Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy.
E. B. WHITEI see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.
More E. B. White Quotes
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Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.
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A schoolchild should be taught grammar-for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy.
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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.
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I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.
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Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp – everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.
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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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Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.
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Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
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Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
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All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.
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There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.
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Use the smallest word that does the job.
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A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
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Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.
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Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
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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 admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
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Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.
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I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
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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.
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Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays
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The city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.
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A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can’t get it by breeding for it, and you can’t buy it with money. It just happens along.
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Life’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.
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The best writing is rewriting.
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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.
E. B. WHITE