Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.
E. B. WHITEHabitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.
More E. B. White Quotes
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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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Nationalism 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.
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I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.
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I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.
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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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Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.
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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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Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.
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Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
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A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.
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Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.
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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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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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All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.
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A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.
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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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Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.
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Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
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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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Oh, I never look under the hood.
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A right is a responsibility in reverse.
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Loneliness is a strange gift.
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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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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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The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.
E. B. WHITE