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Wilbur didn't want food, he wanted love.

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
Wilbur
Food
Didn
Wanted
Love

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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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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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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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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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No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.
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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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A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false lively, not dull accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
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Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?
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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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You're terrific as far as I am concerned.
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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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A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
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From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.
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You have been my friends. That in itself is a tremendous thing.
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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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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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A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.
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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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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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