Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays
E. B. WHITEFrom 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.
More E. B. White Quotes
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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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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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A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.
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It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
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It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck.
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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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The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of 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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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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Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print.
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Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.
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A writer’s style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacites, his bias…it is the Self escaping into the open.
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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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When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.
E. B. WHITE