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I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend - to make flights, carrying others along if you can manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit.

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
Writing
Duty
Ascend
Even
Writer
Flights
Make
Takes
Conceit
Always
Felt
Carrying
Others
Flight
Certain
Manage
Firsts
Along
First
Courage

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A writer should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
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A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
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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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Books are the door of escape from the forest.
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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 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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Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.
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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.
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Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists-just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts.
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Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.
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Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.
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I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.
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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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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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From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.
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Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.
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