The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything
E. B. WHITENationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one’s belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote.
More E. B. White Quotes
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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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Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.
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Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
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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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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.
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Loneliness is a strange gift.
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There is hardly a waiting room in the east that has not served as my cockpit, whether I was waiting to board a train or to see a dentist. And I am usually still trimming sheets when the train starts or drill begins to whine.
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And then, just as Wilbur was settling down for his morning nap, he heard again the thin voice that had addressed him the night before. “Salutations!” said the voice. Wilbur jumped to his feet. “Salu-what?” he cried. “Salutations!” repeated the voice.
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I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
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Writing is both mask and unveiling.
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There’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.
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Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp – everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.
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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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The best writing is rewriting.
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To achieve style, begin by affecting none.
E. B. WHITE