Quotes by Elwyn Brooks White

Elwyn Brooks White

American writer

Alive from: 1899-1985

Category: Writers (Contemporary) | CountryDuits Amerikaans

Quotes 1 till 15 of 28.

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  The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation's pulse, you can't be sure that the nation hasn't just run up a flight of stairs.

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  A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.

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  A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.

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  A man is not expected to love his country, lest he make an ass of himself. Yet our country, seen through the mists of smog, is curiously lovable, in somewhat the way an individual who has got himself into an unconscionable scrape seems lovable - or at least deserving of support.

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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 himself up to make himself more presentable, but a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time.

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  A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

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  All we need is a meteorologist who has once been soaked to the skin without ill effect. No one can write knowingly of the weather who walks bent over on wet days.

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

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  Commuter - one who spends his life in riding to and from his wife; And man who shaves and takes a train, and then rides back to shave again.

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  Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.

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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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  Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

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  Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

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  Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

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  I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they