E. B. White Quotes - Page 11

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• It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.

  E. B. White

  New York, Miracle, Whole

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• We stand or fall by television.

  E. B. White

  Fall, Television

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• When we think of [John F. Kennedy], he is without a hat, standing in the wind and weather. He was impatient of topcoats and hats, preferring to be exposed, and he was young enough and tough enough to enjoy the cold and the wind of those times.... It can be said of him, as of few men in a like position, that he did not fear the weather, and did not trim his sails, but instead challenged the wind itself, to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.

  E. B. White

  Blow, Men, Thinking

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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 man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist - nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin. A writer, writing away, can always fix things up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

  E. B. White

  Time, Writing, Men

  1975 Letter to Corona Macheiner, 11 Jun.

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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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• The complaint about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernize, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.

  E. B. White

  Race, Glasses, Car

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• In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into panic.

  E. B. White

  Writing, Paper, May

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• The South is the land of the sustained sibilant. Everywhere, for the appreciative visitor, the letter "s" insinuates itself in the scene: in the sound of sea and sand, in the singing shell, in the heat of sun and sky, in the sultriness of the gentle hours, in the siesta, in the stir of birds and insects.

  E. B. White

  Sea, Land, Sky

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• The bonus is really one of the great give-aways in business enterprise. It is the annual salve applied to the conscience of the rich and the wounds of the poor.

  E. B. White

  Giving, Bonus, Rich

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• The vision of milk and honey, it comes and goes. But the odor of cooking goes on forever.

  E. B. White

  Milk And Honey, Forever, Cooking

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• Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.

  E. B. White

  Writing, Murder, Obscenity

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• In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech-that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.

  E. B. White

  Writing, Speech, Tests

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

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• Dentistry is more impressive in town-what the rural man calls cleaning the teeth is called "prophylaxis" in New York.

  E. B. White

  New York, Men, Teeth

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• We are such docile creatures, normally, that it takes a virus to jolt us out of life's routine. A couple of days in a fever bed are, in a sense, health-giving; the change in body temperature, the change in pulse , and the change of scene have a restorative effect on the system equal to the hell they raise.

  E. B. White

  Couple, Health, Giving

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• There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.

  E. B. White

  Dream, Men, Support

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.99, Cornell University Press

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• Don Marquis came down after a month on the wagon, ambled over to the bar, and announced, 'I've conquered that goddamn willpower of mine. Gimme a double Scotch.

  E. B. White

  Scotch, Alcohol, Bars

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• My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a "bless the mark" at any spot, and to begin a sentence with "Lord" comma.

  E. B. White

  Writing, Style, Franklin

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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

  Loyalty, Fighting, Tolerance

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.92, Cornell University Press

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• Security, for me, took a tumble not when I read that there were Communists in Hollywood but when I read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control. If a man is in health, he doesn't need to take anybody else's temperature to know where he is going.

  E. B. White

  Loyalty, Men, Hollywood

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

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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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• 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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• Not even a collapsing world looks dark to a man who is about to make his fortune.

  E. B. White

  Money, Dark, Men

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

  E. B. White

  Believe, Society, Decline

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• A man must have something to cling to. Without that he is as a pea vine sprawling in search of a trellis.... I was all asprawl, clinging to Beauty, which is a very restless trellis.

  E. B. White

  Wise, Men, Vines

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