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A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can't get it by breeding for it, and you can't buy it with money. It just happens along.

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
Happens
Indispensable
Really
Accident
Accidents
Silly
Dog
Along
Companionable
Money
Canine
Nature
Breeding

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All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.
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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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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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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.
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Life is always rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.
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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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When an American family becomes separated from its toothbrushes and combs and pajamas for a few hours it considers that it has had quite an adventure.
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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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The siren south is well enough, but New York, at the beginning of March, is a hoyden we would not care to miss--a drafty wench, her temperature up and down, full of bold promises and dust in the eye.
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By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.
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In order to read one must sit down, usually indoors. I am restless and would rather sail a boat than crack a book. I've never had a very lively literary curiosity, and it has sometimes seemed to me that I am not really a literary fellow at all. Except that I write for a living.
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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.
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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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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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Humour plays close to the big, hot fire, which is the truth, and the reader feels the heat.
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A writer should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
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Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.
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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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