Edna Ferber Quotes

Funny, isn't it, how your whole life goes by while you think you're only planning the way you're going to live it?

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

That just goes to show, remarked Pearlie, that you must never judge a woman in a kimono or a bathing suit.

A woman can look both moral and exciting ... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.

It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story.

A placated bully is a hand-fed bully.

Whoever said love conquers all was a fool. Because almost everything conquers love - or tries to.

[Women] ... is nothin' but little girls in long skirts, and their hair done up.

She had been invited to dinners and luncheons and dances, but their doings, she told Dirk, had bored her.

"They're nice," she said, "but they don't have much fun. They're all trying to be something they're not. And that's such hard work. The women were always explaining that they lived in Chicago because their husband's business was here. They all do things pretty well  -  dance or paint or ride or write or sing  -  but not well enough. They're professional amateurs, trying to express something they don't feel; or that they don't feel strongly enough to make it worth while expressing.

The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.

Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.

People permit life to slide past them like a deft pickpocket, their purse-not yet missed and now too late-in his hand.

It's been my experience," observed Emma McChesney, "that when a firm condescends to pay a woman twice as much as a man, that means she's worth six times as much.

No woman ought to pretend she's intelligent. And if she is she ought to have the intelligence to pretend she isn't.

I sat staring up at a shelf in my workroom from which thirty-one books identically dressed in neat dark green leather stared back at me with a sort of cold hostility like children who resent their parents. Don't stare at us like that! they said. Don't blame us if we didn't turn out to be the perfection you expected. We didn't ask to be brought into the world.

There are ... just two kinds of girls. Those who go down town Saturday nights, and those who don't.

Jane Austen. Anyway, I'm not

Any garment which is cut to fit you is much more becoming, even if it is not so splendid as a garment which has been cut to fit somebody not of your stature.

On, no. I hate those arty little places. I like dining in a hotel full of all sorts of people. Dining in a club means you're surrounded by people who're pretty much alike. Their membership in the club means they're there because they are all interested in gold, or because they're university graduates, or belong to the same political party or write, or paint, or have incomes of over fifty thousand a year, or something. I like 'em mixed up, higgledy-piggledy. A dining room full of gamblers, and insurance agents, and actors, and merchants, thieves, bootleggers, lawyers, kept ladies, wives, flaps, travelling men, millionaires  -  everything. That's what I call dining out. Unless one is dining at a friend's house, or course." A rarely long speech for her.

Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.

America
rather, the United States
seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world.

Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.

Death-bed promises should be broken as lightly as they are seriously made.
-The Gay Old Dog

People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus.

Men often marry their mothers.

Roast beef, medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy.

About mistakes it's funny. You got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs they get mad.

Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse.

A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.

The feminine in the man is the sugar in the whisky. The masculine in the woman is the yeast in the bread. Without these ingredients the result is flat, without tang or flavor.

You can run, but what are you running from? Your life? You can't run away from your life.

What could be more exciting! As long as you're fascinated and as long as you keep on fighting the things you think are wrong, you're living. It isn't the evil people in the world who do the most harm. It's the sweet do-nothings that can destroy us.

You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself.

Sweat and blood and health and youth go into every cabbage. Did you know that, Julie? One doesn't despise them as food, knowing that.

The small town smart set is deadly serious about its smartness.

Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded? Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laugher and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt?

Opinion! If every one had so little tact as to give their true opinion when it was asked this would be a miserable world.

I'm tired of hearing you men say that this and that and the other isn't woman's work. Any work is woman's work that a woman can do well.

Writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.

Imported actors, like certain wines, sometimes do not stand the ocean trip. This can be as true of American actors in Europe as it is of European actors in America.

Where Chicago's vast and growing Negro population shifted and moved and stretched its great limbs ominously, reaching out and out in protest and overflowing the bounds that irked it. Her serene face and her quiet manner, her bland interest and friendly look protected her.

But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

One can summon courage and fortitude to face tragedy; irritations and frustrations are a cloud of mosquitoes that nip and sting and drive one frantic.

Home isn't always the place where you were born and bred. Home is the place where your everyday clothes are, and where somebody or something needs you.

The goat's business is none of the sheep's concern.

It was part of theTexas ritual? We know about champagne and caviar but we talk hog and hominy.

I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours.

I like any place that isn't here.

Any piece of furniture, I don't care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated ... , and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character, Selina said.

A closed mind is a dying mind.

If it's freedom you want, come to Texas. No one there tells you what to do and how you have to do it.

In his way and in his day he was a very modern father. "I want you to see all kinds," he would say to her. "I want you to realize that this whole thing is just a grand adventure. A fine show. The trick is to play in it and look at it at the same time."
"What whole thing?"
"Living. All mixed up. The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they're not pleasant things. That's living....

The astronomers tell us that other planets are gifted with two - four - even nine lavish moons. Imagine the romantic possibilities of nine moons.

There are two ways of doing battle against Disgrace. You may live it down; or you may run away from it and hide. The first method is heart-breaking, but sure. The second cannot be relied upon because of the uncomfortable way Disgrace has of turning up at your heels.

It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any places that isn't here.

Your idea of bliss is to wake up on a Monday morning knowing you haven't a single engagement for the entire week. You are cradled in a white paper cocoon tied up with typewriter ribbon.

Housework's the hardest work in the world. That's why men won't do it.

Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.

Christmas is not a season. It is a feeling.

Take Texas the way Texas takes bourbon. Straight. It goes down easier.

I never would just open a door and walk through, I had to bust it down for the hell of it. I just naturally liked doing things the hard way.

If men ever discovered how tough women actually are, they would be scared to death.

Any man who can look handsome in a dirty baseball suit is an Adonis. There is something about the baggy pants, and the Micawber-shaped collar, and the skull-fitting cap, and the foot or so of tan, or blue, or pink undershirt sleeve sticking out at the arms, that just naturally kills a man's best points.

There is an interesting resemblance in the speeches of dictators, no matter what country they may hail from or what language they may speak.

Does one eat peanuts at a ball game?' 'It ain't hardly legal if you don't.

Books should be cherished, like children, books are for the next generation, like children, like history.

But I have felt that to be a Jew was, in some ways at least, to be especially privileged.

A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.

If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics.

A story must simmer in its own juice for months or even years before it's ready to serve.

I suppose it is a gift, being young, but it isn't special. We've all got it, early in life.

Science had married the wilderness and was taming the savage shrew.

In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.

A life like this develops the comedy sense. You can't play tragedy while you're living it.

Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns, or villages. They have had time to dream in their adolescence. No cars to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty, energy-consuming occupations of the city child. Little that is competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the most impressionable period, long evenings for reading, long afternoons in the fields or woods.