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It isn't silence you can cut with a knife any more, it's interchange of ideas. Intelligent discussion of practically everything is what is breaking up modern marriage.

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
Intelligent
Cutting
Marriage
Interchange
Silence
Knife
Modern
Practically
Ideas
Knives
Everything
Breaking
Discussion

More quotes by E. B. White

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Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.
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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.
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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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New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory season yielded more birds than I ever saw in Maine.
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I have one share in corporate Earth, and I am nervous about the management.
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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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We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.
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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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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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Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays
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Humor is like a frog. You can dissect it to see how it works, but by then, it's dead.
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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.
E. B. White
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I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn't know where else to go.
E. B. White
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Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people-- people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.
E. B. White
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The critic leaves at curtain fall To find, in starting to review it, He scarcely saw the play at all For starting to review it.
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Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.
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If I can fool a bug... I can surely fool a man. People are not as smart as bugs.
E. B. White
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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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When a man hangs from a tree it doesn't spell justice unless he helped write the law that hanged him.
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My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a bless the mark at any spot, and to begin a sentence with Lord comma.
E. B. White