E. B. White Quotes - Page 12

Quotes about:

• 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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• 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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• Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.

  E. B. White

  Funny, Inspiring, Mind

  E. B. WHITE (1954). “The SECOND TREE from the CORNER”

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• Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

  E. B. White

  Fall, Writing, Knives

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.159, Cornell University Press

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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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• The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.

  E. B. White

  Change, Running, Long

  E. B. White (2011). “In the Words of E.B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers”, p.85, Cornell University Press

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• The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.

  E. B. White

  Peace, Father, War

  1954 The Second Tree from the Corner, 'The Second Tree from the Corner'.

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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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• 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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• I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears as much as your editorial, on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic.

  E. B. White

  Jobs, Fear, Party

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

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• The theme of 'Charlotte's Web' is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.

  E. B. White

  Pigs, Ideas, Wish

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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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• 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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• The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. Because I have the greatest respect for the reader, and if he's going to the trouble of reading what I've written -- I'm a slow reader myself and I guess most people are -- why, the least I can do is make it as easy as possible for him to find out what I'm trying to say, trying to get at. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

  E. B. White

  Reading, Writing, People

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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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• Half a man's life is devoted to what he calls improvements, yet the original had some quality which is lost in the process.

  E. B. White

  Men, Quality, Half

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• A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there in a book, you may have your question answered

  E. B. White

  Book, Library, May

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life's more stereotyped roles.

  E. B. White

  Pigs, Roles, Chance

  E. B. White (2014). “Essays of E. B. White”, p.20, Harper Collins

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• If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine's copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.

  E. B. White

  Sound, Magazines, Sometimes

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• New York is part of the natural world. I love the city, I love the country, and for the same reasons. The city is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East Forty-Eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory season yielded more birds than I ever saw in Maine.

  E. B. White

  Country, New York, Cities

  Interview with George Plimpton and Frank Crowther for The Paris Review (1969); later published in "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews", Series eight, 1988.

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