In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.
E. B. WHITETrust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print.
More E. B. White Quotes
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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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Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.
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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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Mother: It’s broccoli, dear. — Child: I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.
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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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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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A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer… He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
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The whole problem is to establish communication with ones self.
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To achieve style, begin by affecting none.
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Salutations; it’s just my fancy way of saying hello or good morning
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Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
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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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No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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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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You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.
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People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.
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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’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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In every queen there’s a touch of floozy.
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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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Life’s meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.
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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 would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
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Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can’t erase it.
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Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.
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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.
E. B. WHITE