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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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I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.
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It seemed to me that I should have a desk, even though I had no real need for a desk. I was afraid that if I had no desk in my room my life would seem too haphazard.
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In middle life, the human back is spoiling for a technical knockout and will use the flimsiest excuse, even a sneeze, to fall apart.
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I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
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Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky's and our Camelot.
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English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.
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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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I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.
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There is nothing more likely to start disagreement among people or countries than an agreement.
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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 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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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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Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?
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Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.
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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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Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays
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Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.
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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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Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
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There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.
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