There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.
E. B. WHITEI 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.
More E. B. White Quotes
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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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Before the seed there comes the thought of bloom.
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Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
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Never hurry and never worry!
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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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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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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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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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Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.
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I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.
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Geese are friends to no one, they bad mouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false accusations.
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A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
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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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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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Understanding humor is like dissecting a live frog. It can be done, but the frog tends to die in the process.
E. B. WHITE