A ferment must have begun working in me that afternoon.

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.

A man must have something to cling to. Without that he is as a pea vine sprawling in search of a trellis.

Millions of songs are knocking round, back and forth, inside my head: songs of praise and of wonder. But I can not give birth even to one song.

Summertime, oh, summertime, pattern of life indelible

,the fade proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end;

The afterglow lit the water.

I had trouble making out which was I, the one walking at my side, the one walking in my pants.这句什么意思，作者为什么会有这样的想法，在once more to the lake 的最后，作者也说as he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.

The Railroad

What's the railroad to me?

I never go to see

Where it ends.

It fills a fellow hollows,

And makes banks for the swallows,

It sets the sand a-blowing,

And the blackberries a -growing.

About E.B White:

如“五柳先生”，“少无适俗韵，性本爱丘山…久在樊笼里，复得返自然”

I discovered a long time ago that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the hearth, the inconsequential but near things of this living, was the only kind of creative work which I could accomplish with any sanctity or grace.

White first opened his eyes to the world that he would come to view daily with a newborn's freshness of vision.

A lifelong aversion to public speaking.

He was also among the very first to inveigh against the testing of hydrogen bombs.

He was also one of the first to speak McCarthyism and the blacklist.

And on, and on, and wonderfully on.

Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself—a lad of about 19.

He accepted the National Medal for Literature with the remark that encapsulates his writer's philosophy:"writing is an act of faith, nothing else. And it must be the writer, above all others, who keeps it alive—choked with laughter or with pain."

Remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.

I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive world.

Mr.Forbush's Friends:

But later I came to see that life, not death, would solve all riddles;that an examination of the dead was merely a preliminary to a study of the living, and that it was more essential to preserve the living than the dead.

A bright clear day in January, a gentle breeze, a river mouth where the rippling flood flows into the sparkling sea...

In spring dawns, fair and rosy, when the sun rising over the blue a Arctic, magnificent with floating ice, reveals scene of gorgeous splendor; where ice lies in innumerable shapes, some sparkling like gems and prisms, others rearing vast, white, phantasmal lanes; where the mirage shows towering mountains that never were on land or sea; in summer or winter, in storm or sunshine, there dwells the white Gull, bird of the ice and snow.

When the spring rains and mounting sun begin to tint the meadow grass, when the blackbirds and spring frogs sing their full chorus, then the Snipe arrives at night on the south wind.

Will Strunk:

There is no foundation all down the line. It was the permissive years.这是放纵的年代。

Unless someone is willing to entertain notions of superiorty, the English language disintegrates, just as a home disintegrates unless someone in the family sets standards of good taste, good conduct, and simple justice.

Mosquitoes have arrived with the warm nights, and our bedchamber is their theater under the stars.

Its vigor is unimpaired, and for sheer pith I think it probably sets a record that is not likely to be broken.

Omit needless words.

Under the remembered sting of his kindly lash…

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make alk his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

But a shadow of gloom seems to hang over the page...

His peculiar stance has continued to invigorate me…

Make definite assertions…he felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong...If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! …why compound ignorance with inaudibility? Why run and hide?

Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of time, a man floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope.

关于教材：Longer, lower textbooks are in use in English classes nowadays, I daresay—books with upswept tail fins and automatic verbs. I hope some of them manage to compress as much wisdom into as small a space, manage to come to the point as quickly and illuminate it as amusingly.

Don Marquis:

He was impatient of hard work and humdrum restrictions, yet expression was the need of his soul.

Expression is the need of my soul.

He cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward. So do we all. And when he was through his labors, he fell to the floor, spent. He was vain(so are we all), hungry, saw things from the under side, and was continually bringing up the matter of whether he should be paid for his work. He was bold, disrespectful, possessed of the revolutionary spirit, was never subservient to the boss yet always trying to wheedle food out of him, always getting right to the heart of the matter. And he was contemptuous of those persons who were absorbed in the mere technical details of his writing.

If not a poet at least to harbor the transmigrated soul of a dead poet.

The compulsion is as great today as it ever was, but it is met in a different spirit.

What accounts for so great a falling off?

To interpret humor is as futile as explaining a spider's web in terms of geometry.

his product rich and satisfying, full of sad beauty, bawdy adventure, political wisdom, and wild surmise; full of pain and jollity, full of exact and inspired writing.

to babs

with babs knows what

and babs knows why

Some Remarks on Humor:

I think, to say that there is a deep vein of melancholy running through everyone's life and that the humorist, perhaps more sensible of it than some others, compensates for it actively and positively.

Beneath the sparkling surface of these dilemmas flows the strong tide of human woe.

Practically everyone is a manic depressive of sorts, with his up moments and his down moments...

It plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat.

The world likes humor, but it treats it patronizingly. It decorates its serious artists with laurel, and its wags with Brussels sprouts. It feels that if a thing is funny it can be presumed to be something less than great, because if it were truly great it would be wholly serious. Writers know this and those who take their literary selves with great seriousness are at considerable pains never to associate their name with anything funny or flippant or nonsensical or "light." They suspect it would hurt their reputation, and they are right...

the careful form of art, and the careless shape of life itself.

看到了White对弄臣的看法：

The court fool in Shakespeare's day had no social standing and was no better than a lackey, but he did have some artistic standing and was listened to with considerable attention, there being a well-founded belief that he had the truth hidden somewhere about his person. Artistically, he stood probably higher than the humorist of today, who has gained social position but not the ear of the mighty.(Think of the trouble the world would save itself if it would pay some attention to nonsense!) A narrative poet at court, singing of great deeds, enjoyed a higher standing than the fool and was allowed to wear fine clothes; yet I suspect that the ballad singer was more often than not a second-rate stooge, flattering his monarch lyrically, while the fool must often have been a first-rate character, giving his monarch good advice in bad puns.

...Now it is the commonest thing in the world to hear people call the absence of a sense of humor the one fatal defect. No matter how owlish a man is, he will tell you that. It is a miserable falsehood, and it does incalculable harm. A life without humor is like a life without legs. You are haunted by a sense of incompleteness, and you cannot go where your friends go. You are also somewhat of a burden. But the only really fatal thing is the shamming of humor when you have it not. There are people whose nature meant to be solemn from their cradle to their grave. They are under bonds to remain so. In so far as they are true to themselves they are safe company for any one; but outside their proper field they are terrible. Solemnity is relatively a blessing, and the man who was born with it should never been encouraged to wrench himself away.

We have praised humor so much that we have started an insincere cult, and there are many who think they must glorify it when they hate it from the bottom of their hearts. False humor-worship is the deadliest of social sins, and one of the commonest. People without a grain of humor in their composition will eulogize it by the hour. Men will confess to treason, murder, arson, false teeth, or a wig. How many of them will own up to a lack of humor? The courage that could draw this confession from a man would atone for everything.

Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.

I suspect that the popularity of all dialect stuff derives in part from flattery of the reader---giving him a pleasant sensation of superiority which he gets from working out the intricates of misspelling, and the satisfaction of detaching boorishness or illiteracy in some else. This is not the whole story but it has some bearing in the matter. Incidentally, I am told by an authority on juvenile literature that dialect is tops with children. They like to puzzle out the words. When they catch on to the thing, they must feel that first fine glow of maturity---the ability to exercise higher interlectual powers than those of the character they are looking at.

People ought to start dead.

A Slight Sound at Evening:

A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressively serene and grand. It may be  in Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.

which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard.

As things turned out, Thoreau, very likely without knowing quite what he was up to, took man's relation to Nature and man's dilemma in society and man's capacity for elevating his spirit and he beat all these matters together, in a wild free interval of self-justification and delight, and produced an original omelette from which people can draw nourishment in a hungry day.

He rides into the subject at top speed, shooting in all directions. Many of his shots ricochet and nick him on the rebound, and throughout the melee there is a horrendous cloud of ...

His posturing was not to draw the attention of others to him but rather to draw his own attention more closely to himself."I learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." The sentence has the power to resuscitate the youth drowning in his sea of doubt.

I recall my exhilaration upon reading it, many years ago, in a time of hesitation and despair. It restored me to health.

There was a steadiness in at least one passenger if there was none in the boat. Such steadiness is at the heart of Walden---confidence, faith, the decispline of looking always at what is to be seen, undeviating gratitude for the life-everlasting

At a certain season of our life, we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house.

Its—confidence, its purity, its deliberateness—with awe and wonder, as one would look upon the face of a child asleep.

The St.Nicholas League:

Beneath the radiance of the quiet stars

The earth lies beautiful as in a dream.

Foreword:

Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.

Good-bye to Forty-eight Street:

…would drain away from around my feet, like the outgoing tide, leaving me standing silent on a bare beach.

The word "cancer" exploding in the living room like a time bomb detonated by his grief.

On the theory that the physical act of disposal was the real key to the problem.

Then we buckle down again to the unending task.

Trophies are like leeches. The ones made of paper, such as a diploma from a school or a college, can be burned if you have the guts to light the match...

White真的很幽默，在他讲到清理不需要的东西时，有一块有着海狸咬痕的木板，而他说他此时最需要的是一只海狸帮他把学位帽吞掉，很滑稽。经常看着看着就会笑起来，也难怪他能写出那篇关于幽默的评论。

Home-coming:

Familiarity is the thing—the sense of belonging. It grants exemption from all evil, all shabbiness.

Jumping silently from branch to branch in the thick woods...

A report in Spring:

No matter what changes take place in the world, or in me, nothing ever seems to disturb the face of spring.

It had always been the other way round.以往都是相反的。

对于一个被 new tenant赶跑的怀孕浣熊，作者发出了感慨：I was sorry for her, as I am for any who are evicted from their haunts by the younger and stronger—always a sad occasion for man or beast.

The theme of my life is complexity-through-joy.

The frogs sing the song that never goes out of favor.

In broad daylight...大白天

对于作者来说最生动的记亿：I find this morning that what I most vividly and longingly recall is the sight of my grandson and his little sunburnt sister returning to their kitchen door from an excursion, with trophies of the meadow clutched in their hands—she with a couple of violets, and smiling, he serious and holding dandelions, strangling them in a responsible grip. Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists—just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts.

The Eye of Edna:

Rain fell in a drizzle.

The sky was a gloomy gray.

At this point, I decided to take a stroll. The night was agreeable—moon showing through gray clouds, light rain...

coon Tree:

…of which I knew absolutely nothing but for which I felt a kind of awe.

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority...

On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet socks, it cools the hot little brain...

Such is the case with most of us in this queer century of progress. Events carry us rapidly in directions tangential to our true desires, and we have almost no sensation of being in motion at all--except at odd moments when we explode an H-bomb or send up a hundred new planets or ...

Perhaps success in the future will depend partly on our ability to generate cheap power, but I think it will depend to a greater extent on our ability to resist a technological formula that is sterile...There is more to these rocks than uranium; there is the lichen on the rock, the smell of the fern whose feet are upon the rock, the view from the rock.

I was amazed to discover what a perfect fable it is for these times. You recall that Mrs.Peterkin poured herself a delicious cup of coffee and then, just as she was ready to think it, realized that she had put salt in it instead of sugar. Here was a major crisis. A family conference was held, and the chemist was called in on the case. The chemist put in a little chlorate of potasacid and some hypersulphate of lime. It was no better. The chemist then tried ammonia and, in turn, some oxalic, cyanic, silicic, nitric, formic, nutrous nitric, and carbonic acid. Mrs.Peterkin tasted each, but it still wasn't coffee. After another unsuccessful round of experimentation, this time with herbs, Elizabeth Eliza took the problem to the lady from Philadelphia, who said, "Why doesn't your mother make a fresh cup of coffee?"

The lady's reply is arresting. Certainly the world's brew is bitter today, and we turn more and more to the chemist and herbwoman to restore its goodness. But every time I examine those Cal Tech elements--sun, sea, air, and rock--I am consumed with simple curiosity, not about whether there is thorium in the rock but whether there is another cup of coffee in the pot.

P.S. Moral: a man should not draw conclusions about ...from observing one individual.

A report in January:

I realize what a vast amount of time the world would have for useful and sensible tasks if each country could take its mind off "the enemy," I am appalled.

There is no way to rationalize it.

Formerly it was very pleasant to prop yourself against a sand dune and look out at the beautiful sea, but now you have to lie perfectly flat and look out the beautiful candy wrappers swirling in the eddies of the wind.

And if the surf hath lost its savor, wherewith shall we be surfeited?

Riposte:

Something is awry.

Bedfellows:

作者对新闻的一些看法，没有不偏不倚的文字，美国新闻自由的美好，就在于偏向、扭曲和歪曲来自许多方向，读者必须筛选、核查、比照，才能得出真相。只有新闻的扭曲来自同一个出处，例如政府控制下的新闻制度，读者才会懵了头。

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or nonpolitical, that doesn't have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.

关于批评的看法：It suggests nonconformity and nonconformity suggests disloyalty and disloyalty suggests treason, and before we know where we are, this process has all but identified the critic with saboteur and turned political criticism into an un-American activity instead of democracy's greatest safeguard.

but for the first time in my life I'm beginning to feel like an outsider in my own land.

Democracy is itself a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have.

However distorted was his crazy vision of the beautiful world, however perverse his scheme for establishing an order of goodness by murdering every creature that seemed to him bad, I had to hand him this: he really worked at it.

no one shall be made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe because of nonconformity.

But I feel sadness at All Last Things, too, which is probably a purely selfish, or turned-in, emotion--sorrow not at my dog's death but at my own, which hasn't even occurred yet but which saddens me just to think about in such pleasant surroundings.

Sootfall and fallout:

关于视野和美国选举问题，其实人们的都是围绕着身边的问题，也就是作者提到的“非哥白尼体系”：The habit of thinking in small, conventional term is, of course， not limited to us Americans. You could drop a leaflet or a Hubbard squash on the head of any person in any land and you would almost certainly hit a brain that was whirling in small, conventional circles.There is something about human mind that keeps it well within the confines of the parish, and only one outlook in million is nonparochial. The impression one gets from campaign oratory is that the sun revolves around the earth, the earth revolves around the United States, and the United States revolves around whichever city the speaker happens to be in at the moment. This is what a friend of mine used to call Un-Copernican system. During a presidential race, candidates sometimes manage to create the impression that their thoughts are ranging widely and that they have abandoned conventional thinking. I love to listen to them when they are in the throes of these quadrennial seizures. But I haven't heard much from either candidates that sounded unconventional--although I have heard some things that sounded sensible and sincere. A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.

I think man's gradual, creeping contamination of the planet...make everything said on the subject seem pale and anemic by contrast. I hold one share in the corporate earth and am uneasy about the management.

The smoky fury sits in my throat like a bundle of needles, it explores my nose, chokes off my breath, and makes my eyes burn.

关于实力即自由的看法，只能说是部分正确，具体举了氢弹的例子：

strong we shall stay free, provided we do not have to use our strength.

A nation wearing atomic armor is like a knight whose armor has grown so heavy he is immobilized; he can hardly walk, hardly sit in his horse, hardly think, hardly breathe.(很形象的比喻)The H-bomb is an extremely effective deterrent to war, but it has little virtue as a weapon of war, because it would leave the world uninhabitable...

Today, no nation, whatever its thermonuclear power, is a strong nation in the sense that it is fully independent nation. All are weak, and all are weak from the same cause: each depends on the others for salvation, yet none likes to admit this dependence, and there is no machinery for interdependence. The big cities are weak because the strength has gone out of their arms--which are too terrifying to use, too poisonous to explode. The little nations are weak because they have always been relatively weak and now they have to breathe the same bad air as the big ones...

But at least we have a problem that is clearly a community problem, devoid of nationality--the problem of the total pollution of the planet.

The president speaks often of "the peaceful uses of atomic energy,"and they are greatly on his mind. I believe the peaceful use of atomic energy that should take precedence over all other use is this: stop it from contaminating the soil and the sea, the rain and the sky, and the bones of man.(环境问题至今任然未见有大的好转，中国也是一样，可能要更糟一些，因为中国管理能力太弱，毕竟“地大物博”)This is elementary. It comes ahead of "good-will"ships and it comes ahead of cheap power. What good is cheap power if your child already has an incurable cancer?

It is time men allowed their imagination to infect their intellect, time we all rushed headlong into wilder regions of thought where the earth again revolves around the sun instead of around the Suez(苏伊士运河), regions where no individual and no group can blithely assume the right to sow the sky with seeds of mischief, and where the sovereign nation at last begins to function as the true friend and guardian of sovereign man.

The dirty state of affairs on earth is getting worse, not better. Our soil, our rivers, our seas, our air carry an ever-increasing load of industrial wastes, agricultural poisons, and military debris.

In a darkening and dirt-ridden world...

We are in a vast riddle, all of us--dependence on a strength that is inimical to life---and  what we are really doing is fighting a war that uses the lives of future individuals, rather than the lives of existing young men.

讲到了苏联和美国的竞争，White 这么看：Because our adversary tests, we test; because we test, they test. Where is the end of this dirty habit? I think there is no military solution, no economic solution, only political solution...

These nuclear springtimes have a pervasive sadness about them, the virgin earth having been the victim of rape attacks.(White的讽刺和比喻都很强悍，还有他冷不防的幽默，比如那段时期中国在研究核武器，他如下评论：If Red China learns the trick, we will probably see the greatest pyrotechnic display yet, for the Chinese love fireworks of all kinds. 事实是我们研发出来了)

This is a smiling morning; I am writing where I can took out at our garden piece, which has been newly harrowed, ready for planting. The rich brown patch of ground used to bring delight to eye and mind at this fresh season of promise. For me the scene has been spoiled by the maggots that work in the mind. Tomorrow we will have rain, and the rain falling on the garden will carry its cargo of debris from old explosions in distant places. Whether the amount of this freight is great or small, whether it is measurable by the farmer or can only be guessed at, one thing is certain:the character of rain has changed, the joy of watching it soak the waiting earth has been diminished, and the whole meaning and worth of gardens has been brought into question.

Unity:

这里提到了苏联时期的统一问题：

Soviet arms, terrible as they are, seem less fearsome to me than Soviet's dedication to its political faith, which includes the clear goal of political unity.

Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.

那时候赫鲁晓夫提议裁军，即通过销毁军事武器来消灭战争。“I am afraid that blaming armaments for war is like blaming fever for disease.” Total disarmament would not leave anyone feel of the threat of war, it would simply leave everyone temporarily without the help of arms in the event of war.Disarmament talks divert our gaze from the root of the mater, which is not the control of weapons, or weapons themselves, but the creation of the machinery for the solution of the problems that give rise to the use of weapons.

Disarmament, I think, is a mirage. I don't mean it is indistinct or delusive, I mean it isn't there. Every ship, every plane could be scrapped, every stockpile destroyed, every soldier mustered out, and if the original reasons for holding arms were still present, the world would not have been disarmed.Arms would simply be in a momentary state of suspension, preparatory to new and greater arms. The eyes of all of us are fixed on a shape we seem to see up ahead-- a vision of a world relaxed, orderly, secure, friendly. Disarmament looks good because it sounds good, but unhappily one does not get rid of disorder by getting rid of munitions, and disarmament is not solid land containing a harbor, it is a illusion caused by political phenomena, just as a mirage is an illusion caused by atmospheric phenomena, a land mass that doesn't exist.

An arm race is a frightening thing, but eighty sovereign nations suddenly turning up without arms is truly terrifying...A dictator dearly loves a vacuum, and he loves to rattle people. Disarmament in this day would increase, not diminish, the danger of war. Today's weapons are too destructive too use, so they stand poised and quiet; this is our strange climate, when arms are safer than no arms. If modern weapons make war unlikely, had we not better kept them until we have found the political means of making war unnecessary?

To hold quixotic views about disarmament is my lot, and it is not a happy one. What happens to arms in the next few years may serve all of us, or destroy all of us. In these circumstances a man feels uneasy at expressing any opinion at all, since it might in some slight way affect adversely the course of events.

Well politicians are busy men. Primarily they are not paid to indulge in the pastime of shaping the world in an ideal mode, out of pure theory and pure reason; they are paid to get us through the day as best they can....But I believe that if a public man speaks of the rule of law at all, he should stay with the subject long enough to say what he has in mind: Who are the authors of this law? Who are the enforcers? From whom do they derive their authority? What are the geographical conditions? What is the framework within which it lives?

For I would feel that although I was being placed temporarily in a more dangerous position, I was nevertheless occupying higher ground, where the view was better.

Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits; it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men.

"The trouble today," he wrote, "is that the Communist world understands unity but not liberty, while the free world understands liberty but not unity. Eventual victory may be won by the first of the two sides to achieve the synthesis of both liberty and unity."

The World of Tomorrow:

From so much culture, from so much concentrated beauty and progress, one can retain only a fragment.

Here Is New York:

The quality in New York that insulates its inhabitants from life may simply weaken them as individuals. Perhaps it is healthier to live in a community where, when a cornice falls, you feel the blow; where, when the governor passes, you see at any rate his hat.

for creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.

Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city's tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of morale.

住在纽约的有三种人： Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion.

The commuters dies with tremendous mileage to his credit, but he is no rover.

At the feet of the tallest and plushiest offices lie the crummiest slums.

this vigorous spear that presses heaven hard.

关于街头行乞和醉汉现象：Touched for a dime, you try to drop the coin and not touch the hand, because the hand is dirty; you try to avoid the glance, because the glance accuses. This is not so much personal menace as universal--the cold menace with unresolved human suffering and poverty and the advanced stages of the disease alcoholism. On a summer night the drunks sleep in the open. The sidewalk is a free bed, and there are no lice. Pedestrians step along and over and around the still forms as though walking on a battlefield among the dead.