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

More quotes by E. B. White

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Use the smallest word that does the job.
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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 “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.
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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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Life's accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up.
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Good deeds never go unpunished.
E. B. White
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It sometimes takes days, even weeks, before a dog's nerves tire. In the case of terriers it can run into months.
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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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If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine's copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.
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As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading-the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.
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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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A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.
E. B. White
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There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.
E. B. White
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I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.
E. B. White
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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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Advice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject.
E. B. White
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The vision of milk and honey, it comes and goes. But the odor of cooking goes on forever.
E. B. White
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The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.
E. B. White
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Even now with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt. I still feel a memorial chill on casting off.
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