Life’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.
E. B. WHITEBefore the seed there comes the thought of bloom.
More E. B. White Quotes
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Salutations; it’s just my fancy way of saying hello or good morning
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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.
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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 one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
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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.
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If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most.
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In a man’s middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.
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Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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There 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.
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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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Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.
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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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When I get sick of what men do, I have only to walk a few steps in another direction to see what spiders do. Or what the weather does. This sustains me very well indeed.
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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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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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Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print.
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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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The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.
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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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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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Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day. But if we forget to savor the world, what possible reason do we have for saving it? In a way, the savoring must come first.
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Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
E. B. WHITE