Quote

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.

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
Stand
Anyone
Heaven
Trifle
Helping
Trifles
Littles
Lift
Little
Lifts
Trying
Inspiring
Life
Perhaps

More quotes by E. B. White

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I have a spaniel that defrocked a nun last week. He took hold of the cord. I had hold of the leash. It was like elephants holding tails. Imagine me undressing a nun, even second hand.
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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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Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
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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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Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?
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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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When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.
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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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You're terrific as far as I am concerned.
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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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Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.
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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.
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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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All poets who, when reading from their own works,m experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.
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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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Humor is like a frog. You can dissect it to see how it works, but by then, it's dead.
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By comparison with other less hectic days, the city is unconfortable and inconvenient but New Yorkers tempramentally do not crave comfort and convenience - if they did they would live elsewhere.
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As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left us in a bad time.
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I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty—everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?
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I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
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