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Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.

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
Able
Shed
Never
Birthday
Mental
Image
Comedy
Special
Age
Youthfulness
Problem
Lad

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New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory season yielded more birds than I ever saw in Maine.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
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A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
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We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.
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Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
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No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.
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Even now with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt. I still feel a memorial chill on casting off.
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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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Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north...As he peeked ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.
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In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.
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I don't understand it, and I don't like what I don't understand.
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I seldom went to bed before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night.
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Deathlessness should be arrived at in a... haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.
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A right is a responsibility in reverse.
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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.
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Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?
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