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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.

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
Two
Sexual
Form
Communication
Power
Reader
Persons
Writer
Giving
Gives
Never
Present
Reading
Experience
Sublimity

More quotes by E. B. White

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I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.
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Don't write about Man write about a man.
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I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision, we shall discover a new and unbearable disturbance of the modern peace, or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television - of that I am quite sure.
E. B. White
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Why is it, do you suppose, that an Englishman is unhappy until he has explained America?
E. B. White
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But we have received a sign, Edith - a mysterious sign. A miracle has happened on this farm... in the middle of the web there were the words 'Some Pig'... we have no ordinary pig. Well, said Mrs. Zuckerman, it seems to me you're a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider.
E. B. White
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No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.
E. B. White
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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.
E. B. White
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I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.
E. B. White
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Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.
E. B. White
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When my wife's Aunt Caroline was in her nineties, she lived with us, and she once remarked: 'Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.' I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.
E. B. White
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A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. ... A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy: true, not false lively, not dull accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
E. B. White
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Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
E. B. White
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Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
E. B. White
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We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. . . . The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witch hunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.
E. B. White
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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.
E. B. White
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A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
E. B. White
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I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. Never worry about your heart till it stops beating.
E. B. White
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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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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.
E. B. White
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English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.
E. B. White