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E B White Inspirational Quotes (147)

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The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.
E. B. White
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By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is unconfortable and inconvenient but New Yorkers tempramentally do not crave comfort and convenience - if they did they would live elsewhere.
E. B. White
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Diplomacy is the lowest form of politeness because it misquotes the greatest number of people. A nation, like an individual, if it has anything to say, should simply say it.
E. B. White
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Advice to young writers wo want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.
E. B. White
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From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.
E. B. White
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I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty—everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?
E. B. White
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A schoolchild should be taught grammar - for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.
E. B. White
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America is now liberty-conscious. In a single generation it has progressed from being toothbrush-conscious, to being air-minded, to being liberty-conscious.
E. B. White
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It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
E. B. White
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A “fraternity” is the antithesis offraternity. The first (that is, the order or organization) is predicated on the idea of exclusion the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality.
E. B. White
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The first day of spring was once the time for taking the young virgins into the fields, there in dalliance to set an example in fertility for nature to follow. Now we just set the clocks an hour ahead and change the oil in the crankcase.
E. B. White
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Have you ever found anything that gives you relief? Yes. A drink.
E. B. White
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The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself he is approaching, no other and he should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style - all mannerisms, tricks, adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.
E. B. White
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A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there in a book, you may have your question answered
E. B. White
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New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.
E. B. White
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The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.
E. B. White
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Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be.
E. B. White
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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
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Books 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.
E. B. White
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A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
E. B. White
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I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. Never worry about your heart till it stops beating.
E. B. White
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A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.
E. B. White
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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.
E. B. White
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We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. . . . The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.
E. B. White
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