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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.

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
Life
Middle
Knockout
Age
Knockouts
Use
Sneeze
Fall
Spoiling
Back
Technical
Human
Aging
Humans
Apart
Even
Excuse

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Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don't have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.
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I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
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Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.
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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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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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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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In a man's middle years there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.
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No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
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I would really rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else
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The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.
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Television should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky's and our Camelot.
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I seldom went to bed before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night.
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