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

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I don't understand it, and I don't like what I don't understand.
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I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
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Humor is like a frog. You can dissect it to see how it works, but by then, it's dead.
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Well,” said Stuart, “a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone.
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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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I can still see my first dog. For six years he met me at the same place after school and convoyed me home - a service he thought up himself. A boy doesn't forget that sort of association.
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I have a spaniel that defrocked a nun last week. He took hold of the cord. I had hold of the leash. It was like elephants holding tails. Imagine me undressing a nun, even second hand.
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Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being 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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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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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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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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No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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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.
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There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.
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Use the smallest word that does the job.
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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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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.
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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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A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
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