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.
E. B. WHITEBooks are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people– people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.
More E. B. White Quotes
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Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together-just the two of you.
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Is there anything in the universe more beautiful and protective than the simple complexity of a spider’s web?
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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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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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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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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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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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Nauseous. Nauseated. The first means “sickening to contemplate”; the second means “sick at the stomach.” Do not, therefore, say “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.
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I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.
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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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You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you.
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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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It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
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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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Before the seed there comes the thought of bloom.
E. B. WHITE