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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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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
Though
Fierce
Learn
Brutal
Everything
Clever
Right
Friendship
Even
Friend
Scheming
Like
Pretty
Bloodthirsty
Courses
Charlotte
Course
Gamble

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Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.
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In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.
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Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
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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.
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Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays
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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.
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Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
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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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new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.
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A right is a responsibility in reverse.
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When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.
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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.
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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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In a man's middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.
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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.
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