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.
E. B. WHITEOnly a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays
More E. B. White Quotes
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You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway?
E. B. WHITE -
Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
E. B. WHITE -
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
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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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An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
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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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A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can’t get it by breeding for it, and you can’t buy it with money. It just happens along.
E. B. WHITE -
In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.
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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.
E. B. WHITE -
A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.
E. B. WHITE -
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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Writing is both mask and unveiling.
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Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.
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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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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.
E. B. WHITE