English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education – sometimes it’s sheer luck, like getting across the street.
E. B. WHITEI don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.
More E. B. White Quotes
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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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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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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?
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Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.
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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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A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.
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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.
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Democracy is itself, a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.
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Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.
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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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A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.
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Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
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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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Loneliness is a strange gift.
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Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.
E. B. WHITE