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I don't understand it, and I don't like what I don't understand.
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
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More quotes by E. B. White
Good deeds never go unpunished.
E. B. White
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.
E. B. White
No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
E. B. White
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.
E. B. White
I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.
E. B. White
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.
E. B. White
Wilbur burst into tears. I dont want to die, he moaned. I want to stay alive, right here in my comfortable manure pile with all my friends. I want to breathe the beautiful air and lie in the beautiful sun.
E. B. White
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.
E. B. White
Never hurry and never worry!
E. B. White
A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
E. B. White
Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.
E. B. White
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.
E. B. White
Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky's and our Camelot.
E. B. White
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.
E. B. White
A schoolchild should be taught grammar - for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases.
E. B. White
There is another sort of day which needs celebrating in song -- the day of days when spring at last holds up her face to be kissed, deliberate and unabashed. On that day no wind blows either in the hills or in the mind.
E. B. White
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.
E. B. White
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.
E. B. White
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.
E. B. White
The essayist . . . can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter - philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast.
E. B. White