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I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

E. B. White

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E. B. White
Age: 86 †
Born: 1899
Born: July 11
Died: 1985
Died: October 1
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Mount Vernon
New York
Elwyn Brooks White
E.B. White
Morning
Seductive
Enjoy
Torn
Desire
Uncertainty
Makes
Improve
Hard
Planning
Time
Arise
Life
Plan
World
Plans

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Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
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Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.
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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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A writer should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
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All poets who, when reading from their own works,m experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.
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There is another sort of day which needs celebrating in song -- the day of days when spring at last holds up her face to be kissed, deliberate and unabashed. On that day no wind blows either in the hills or in the mind.
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Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.
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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.
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A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.
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Half a man's life is devoted to what he calls improvements, yet the original had some quality which is lost in the process.
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A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.
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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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Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.
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I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
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Books are the door of escape from the forest.
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It seemed to me that I should have a desk, even though I had no real need for a desk. I was afraid that if I had no desk in my room my life would seem too haphazard.
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Einstein is loved because he is gentle, respected because he is wise. Relativity being not for most of us, we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison, who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the hope of penetrating it.
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As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.
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From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting. . . . On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain.
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Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.
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