Use the smallest word that does the job.
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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Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
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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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To achieve style, begin by affecting none.
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In every queen there’s a touch of floozy.
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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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Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north…As he peeked ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.
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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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Before the seed there comes the thought of bloom.
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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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One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
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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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A right is a responsibility in reverse.
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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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“What are they, and where are you?” screamed Wilbur. “Please, please, tell me where you are. And what are salutations?” “Salutations are greetings,” said the voice. “When I say ‘salutations,’ it’s just my fancy way of saying hello or good morning.
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It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck.
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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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A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.
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The best writing is rewriting.
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The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.
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English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education – sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.
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Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
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I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn’t know where else to go.
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Good deeds never go unpunished.
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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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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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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.
E. B. WHITE