Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.
E. B. WHITEThere is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.
More E. B. White Quotes
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Extreme cold when it first arrives seems to generate cheerfulness and sociability. For a few hours all life’s dubious problems are dropped in favor of the clear and congenial task of keeping alive.
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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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Loneliness is a strange gift.
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A right is a responsibility in reverse.
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I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.
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Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.
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Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.
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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.
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Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy.
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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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We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.
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Writing is both mask and unveiling.
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I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty-everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?
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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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Never hurry and never worry!
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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.
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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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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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Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
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The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
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Understanding humor is like dissecting a live frog. It can be done, but the frog tends to die in the process.
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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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Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.
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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
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Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.
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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.
E. B. WHITE