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The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts.

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
Decorates
Artists
Wags
Humor
Laurel
Serious
Brussels
Artist
Sprouts
World
Laurels
Treats
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new york provides not only a continuing excitation but also a spectacle that is continuing.
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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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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 admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
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New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.
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Deathlessness should be arrived at in a... haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.
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Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.
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Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.
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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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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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You're terrific as far as I am concerned.
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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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