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Geese are friends to no one, they bad mouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false accusations.

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
Everybody
Accusations
Friends
Ingratitude
Used
Accusation
Everything
Geese
Mouth
False
Mouths
Friendship
Companionable

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Our vegetable garden is coming along well, with radishes and beans up, and we are less worried about revolution that we used to be.
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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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A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
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I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.
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Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp - everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.
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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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Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky's and our Camelot.
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I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles.
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The circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade.
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Not even a collapsing world looks dark to a man who is about to make his fortune.
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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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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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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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The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples, no consideration, no decency, no milk of rodent kindness, no compunctions, no higher feeling, no friendliness, no anything
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I don't understand it, and I don't like what I don't understand.
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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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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.
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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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Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.
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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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