Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Edna Ferber

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

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

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.

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

It's terrible to realize you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die, and then it's too late.

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.

A closed mind is a dying mind.

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

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.

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

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.

Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling.

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

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

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.

Spring ... made fair false promises which summer was called upon to keep.

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

No one in the United States has the right to own millions of acres of American land, I don't care how they came by it.

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

Roast Beef, Medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy. Seated at Life's Dining Table, with the menu of Morals before you, your eye wanders a bit over the entrees, the hors d'oeuvres, and the things a la though you know that Roast Beef, Medium, is safe and sane, and sure.

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

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.

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

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.

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

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.

Men often marry their mothers.

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

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.

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

The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

... 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.

Cherry cobbler is shortcake with a soul.

There are only two kinds of people in the world that really count. One kind's wheat and the other kind's emeralds.

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.

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

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?

There are people who have a penchant for cities-more than that, a talent for them, a gift of sensing them, of feeling their rhythm and pulsebeats, as others have a highly developed music sense, or color reaction. It is a thing that cannot be acquired.

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

I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.

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.

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

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.

I never go to weddings. Waste of time. Person can get married a dozen times. Lots of folks do. Family like ours, know everybody in the state of Texas and around outside, why, you could spend your life going to weddings. But a funeral, that's different. You only die once.

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

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

here in Texas maybe we've got into the habit of confusing bigness with greatness.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

It's terrible to realize that you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die; and, then it's too late.

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.

don't you hate people who say they're not complaining and then complain?

Emma McChesney was engaged in that nerve-wracking process known as getting things out of the way. When Emma McChesney aimed to get things out of the way she did not use a shovel; she used a road-drag.

To be alive is a fine thing. It is the finest thing in the world, though hazardous. It is a unique thing. It happens only once in a lifetime. To be alive, to know consciously that you are alive, and to relish that knowledge -- this is a kind of magic. Or it may be a kind of madness, exhilarating but harmless.

A placated bully is a hand-fed bully.

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

I sometimes wonder ... if the land is not destroying the people who inhabit it as the people who inhabit it are destroying the land. A magic continent, a Peculiar Treasure, stuffed with riches, millions in it are starving in the midst of plenty.

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

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.

We no longer build fireplaces for physical warmth?we build them for the warmth of the soul; we build them to dream by, to hope by, to home by.