E. B. White Quotes - Page 10

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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

Morning, War, Democracy

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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.

E. B. White

Country, Jobs, Tasks

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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.

E. B. White

Fall, Play, Saws

E. B. White (1989). “The Letters of E. B. White”, Perennial

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Life's accumulation is more discouraging than life itself, when stirred up.

E. B. White

Accumulation, Discouraging

E. B. White (1989). “The Letters of E. B. White”, Perennial

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"Have you ever found anything that gives you relief?" "Yes. A drink."

E. B. White

Giving, Relief, Drink

"The Second Tree From The Corner".

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In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone.

E. B. White

Country, Design, Attention

E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.139, Cornell University Press

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A breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.

E. B. White

Style, Spirit, Imagine

William Strunk Jr., E.B. White (1962). “the Elements of Style”

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Government is the thing. Law is the thing. Not brotherhood, not international cooperation, not security councils that can stop war only by waging it... Where does security lie, anyway - security against the thief, a bad man, the murderer? In brotherly love? Not at all. It lies in government.

E. B. White

War, Lying, Men

Common Cause: A Monthly Report of the Committee to Frame a World Constitution, Vol. I, No. 2, August 1947.

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Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.

E. B. White

Trying, Too Much, Sometimes

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Einstein is loved because he is gentle, respected because he is wise. Relativity being not for most of us, we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison, who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the hope of penetrating it.

E. B. White

Wise, Dark, Gleam

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Every American, to the last man, lays claim to a "sense" of humor and guards it as his most significant spiritual trait, yet rejects humor as a contaminating element wherever found. America is a nation of comics and comedians; nevertheless, humor has no stature and is accepted only after the death of the perpetrator.

E. B. White

Funny, Spiritual, Men

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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.

E. B. White

New York, Eye, Dust

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Of course, it may be that the arts of writing and photography are antithetical. The hope and aim of a word-handler is that he maycommunicate a thought or an impression to his reader without the reader's realizing that he has been dragged through a series of hazardous or grotesque syntactical situations. In photography the goal seems to be to prove beyond a doubt that the cameraman, in his great moment of creation, was either hanging by his heels from the rafters or was wedged under the floor with his lens in a knothole.

E. B. White

Photography, Art, Writing

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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.

E. B. White

New York, Community, Events

E.B. White (2011). “Here is New York”, p.22, New York Review of Books

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There is another sort of day which needs celebrating in song -- the day of days when spring at last holds up her face to be kissed, deliberate and unabashed. On that day no wind blows either in the hills or in the mind.

E. B. White

Song, Spring, Blow

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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

Communication, Reading, Two

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A shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note of music, and the way the back of a baby’s neck smells if it’s mother keeps it tidy,” answered Henry. “Correct,” said Stuart. “Those are the important things. You forgot one thing, though. Mary Bendix, what did Henry Rackmeyer forget?” “He forgot ice cream with chocolate sauce on it,” said Mary quickly.

E. B. White

Mother, Baby, Dark

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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.

E. B. White

Cities, Comfort, Convenience

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Even now; with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt. I still feel a memorial chill on casting off.

E. B. White

Casting Off, Memorial, Voyages

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The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition. (Written in 1949, 22 years before the World Trade Center was completed.)

E. B. White

New York, Islands, Years

Here Is New York (1949)

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A library is many things. It's a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It's a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books. If you want to find out about something, the information is in the reference books---the dictionaries, the encyclopedias, the atlases. If you like to be told a story, the library is the place to go.

E. B. White

Rain, Book, Thinking

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I have no warm up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.

E. B. White

Writing, Exercise, Drink

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I believe... that security declines as security machinery expands.

E. B. White

Believe, Society, Decline

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A “fraternity” is the antithesis offraternity. The first (that is, the order or organization) is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality.

E. B. White

Ideas, Perspective, Feelings

"In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers".

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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.

E. B. White

Morning, Night, Men

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E. B. White

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Born: July 11, 1899
Died: October 1, 1985
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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