Edna Ferber Quotes

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

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

A closed mind is a dying mind.

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

I'm not much to look at", replied Elizabeth, "but I'm beautiful inside.

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

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.

For equipment she had youth, curiosity, a steel strong frame...four hundred ninety-seven dollars; and a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps, painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and Burgundy, crysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

It's fun telling you tall Texas tales. You always look like a little girl who's hearing Cinderella for the first time.

A closed country is a dying country... A closed mind is a dying mind.' from a radio broadcast in 1947

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

AUTHORS SHOULD BE READ BUT NOT SEEN; RARELY ARE THEY A WINSOME SIGHT.

He sat looking down at his hands--his fine strong unscarred hands. Suddenly and unreasonably he thought of another pair of hands--his mother's--with the knuckles enlarged, the skin broken--expressive--her life written on them. Scars. She had them.

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.

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

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

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.

[She had] a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.

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.

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

You just look upon life as an annoying interruption to ranching.

Some day I'll probably marry a horny-handed son of a toil, and if I do it'll be the horny hands that will win me. If you want to know, I like 'em with their scars on them. There's something about a man who has fought for it - I don't know what it is - a look in his eye - the feel of his hand. He needn't have been successful - thought he probably would be. I don't know. I'm not very good at this analysis stuff. I know he - well, you haven't a mark on you. Not a mark. You quit being an architect, or whatever it was, because architecture was an uphill disheartening job at the time. I don't say that you should have kept on. For all I know you were a bum architect. But if you had kept on - if you had loved it enough to keep on - fighting, and struggling, and sitcking it out - why, that fight would show in your face to-day - in your eyes and your jaw and your hands and in your way of standing and walking and sitting and talking. Listen. I'm not critcizing you. But you're all smooth. I like 'em bumpy.

The leading lady had a large and saving sense of humor. But there is nothing that blunts the sense of humor more quickly than a few months of one-night stands. Even O. Henry could have seen nothing funny about that room.

Thomas B. Costain, Herman Wouk, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kenneth Roberts, Edna Ferber, Sholem Asch, Ben Ames Williams, Frederic Wakeman, Frances Parkinson Keyes, Irwin Shaw, Budd Schulberg, Hamilton Basso, and, of course, Samuel Shellabarger.

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.

She faced him, sitting up very straight in bed, the little wool shawl hunched about her shoulders. “Dirk, are you ever going back to architecture? The war is history, it’s now or never with you. Pretty soon it will be too late. Are you ever going back to architecture? To your profession? A clean amputation. “No, Mother.” She gave an actual gasp, as though icy water had been thrown full in her face. She looked suddenly old, tired. Her shoulders sagged. He stood in the doorway, braced for her reproaches. But when she spoke it was to reproach herself. “Then I’m a failure.” “Oh, what nonsense, Mother. I’m happy. You can’t live somebody else’s life. You used to tell me, when I was a kid I remember, that life wasn’t just an adventure, to be taken as it came, with the hope that something glorious was hidden just around the corner. You said you had lived that way and it hadn’t worked. You said ——” She interrupted him with a little cry. “I know I did. I know I did.” Suddenly she raised a warning finger. Her eyes were luminous, prophetic. “Dirk, you can’t desert her like that!” “Desert who?” He was startled. “Beauty! Self-expression. Whatever you want to call it. You wait! She’ll turn on you some day. Some day you’ll want her, and she won’t be there.

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. Remember, no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s just so much”—he used the gambler’s term, unconsciously—“just so much velvet.

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....

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. . . . The more kinds of people you see, the more things you do, and the more things happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they're not pleasant things. That's living . . . ~ Edna Ferber's SO BIG

She read absorbedly books found in boarding-house parlours, in hotels, in such public libraries as the times afforded. She was alone for hours a day, daily. Frequently her father, fearful of loneliness for her, brought her an armful of books and she had an orgy, dipping and swooping about among them in a sort of gourmand's ecstasy of indecision. In this way, at fifteen, she knew the writings of Byron, Jane Austen, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Felicia Hemans. Not to speak of Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, Bertha M. Clay, and that good fairy of the scullery, the Fireside Companion, in whose pages factory girls and dukes were brought together as inevitably as steak and onions. These last were, of course, the result of Selina's mode of living, and were loaned to her by kind-hearted landladies, chambermaids, and waitresses all the way from California to New York.

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

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

A woman can look both moral and exciting — if she also looks as if it were quite a struggle.' quoted in Reader's Digest interview in 1954

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

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

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

Jane Austen. Anyway, I’m not

She was a strange mixture of tomboy and bookworm, which was a mercifully kind arrangement for both body and mind.

It is given to very few women to know the beauty of a man's real friendship.

Think of the rotten time Alice would have had in Wonderland if she hadn't been broad-minded. Take it as it comes.

Even their voices go up at the end of a declarative sentence,

with superb courage, and the decision and intelligence of a man.

JARED DIBBLE Gone to Heaven Like a sign on an office door. Out for lunch. Back at two.

What can death do to you at ninety that life hasn’t done to you already!

You just go until you come to a closed door. And you say "Open Sesame!" and there you are.

And within her something was screaming: "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He knows French. And those girls that can row and everything. And me, I don't know anything. Oh, God, what'll I do?

The room was in almost comic disorder. It was a room in which a struggle has taken place between its occupant and that burning-eyed hag, Sleeplessness. The hag, it was plain, had won.

And in the stillness of the room you heard the roar and howl and crash of the great river whose flood had caught them land shaken them and brought Magnolia Ravenal to bed ahead of her time.

No sooner do you get a field cleared of them than within another year a new layer has somehow worked its way to the surface. It’s my opinion they boil up from hell, those stones, cooling on the way.

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. . . . The more kinds of people you see, 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 . . . Emos moved the bookmark so he would not forget the passage from Edna Ferber’s novel So Big. He had not been present for Speranza’s

I think that 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.

Many earnest young writers with a flow of adjectives and a passion for detail have attempted to describe the quiet of a great city at night, when a few million people within it are sleeping, or ought to be. They work in the clang of a distant owl car, and the roar of an occasional "L" train, and the hollow echo of the footsteps of the late passer-by. They go elaborately into description, and are strong on the brooding hush, but the thing has never been done satisfactorily.

Awake and asleep the novel is with you, dogging your footsteps. Strange formless bits of material float out from the ether about you and attach themselves to the main body of the story as though they had hung suspended in air for years, waiting.

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.

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.

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.

Some day the marriageable age for women will be advanced from twenty to thirty, and the old maid line will be changed from thirty to forty. When that time comes there will be surprisingly few divorces. The husband of whom we dream at twenty is not at all the type of man who attracts us at thirty.

Yes. All the worth-while things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in candle-light. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures. People—all kinds of people. Work that you love. And growth—growth and watching people grow. Feeling very strongly about things and then developing that feeling to—to make

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?

The railroad they built yonder wasn’t even a decent road, but they’d been granted all that land by a rotten Congress that they’d bought up—land on both sides of the tracks for miles and miles, east and west. That’s what they were after, you see. They got all that land along the right of way—hundreds of thousands of acres—and it never cost them a cent of their own money.

We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be. - May Sarton You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It's only that. - Edna St. Vincent Millay We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music. - Albert Einstein ————- Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place. - Robert Brault Some things arrive on their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever. - Gail Godwin Art makes us exercise the weakest muscle in the human body, the muscle of empathy. - Etgar Keret In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life. - Isaac Bashevis Singer ——————————————————————————— 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. - Edna Ferber You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself. - Edna Ferber What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. - Susan Sontag ——————————————————————————— There comes a time when suddenly you realize that laughter is something you remember and that you were the one laughing. - Marlene Dietrich We work in the dark, We do what we can, We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. - Henry James

But best of all, the fascination of the People I'd Like to Know. They pop up now and then in the shifting crowds, and are gone the next moment, leaving behind them a vague regret. Sometimes I call them the People I'd Like to Know and sometimes I call them the People I Know I'd Like, but it means much the same. Their faces flash by in the crowd, and are gone, but I recognize them instantly as belonging to my beloved circle of unknown friends.

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 warmhearted, overfriendly; 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 schnuckle among the nations of the world.

Where are you going this hot day, Mis’ DeJong?” Selina sat up very straight. “To Bagdad, Mrs. Pool.” “To — Where’s that? What for?” “To sell my jewels, Mrs. Pool. And to see Aladdin, and Harun-al-Rashid and Ali Baba. And the Forty Thieves.” Mrs. Pool had left her rocker and had come down the steps. The wagon creaked on past her gate. She took a step or two down the path, and called after them. “I never heard of it. Bag — How do you get there?” Over her shoulder Selina called out from the wagon seat. “You just go until you come to a closed door. And you say ‘Open Sesame!’ and there you are.” Bewilderment shadowed Mrs. Pool’s placid face. As the wagon lurched on down the road it was Selina who was smiling and Mrs. Pool who was serious. The boy, round eyed, was looking up at his mother. “That’s out of Arabian Nights, what you said. Why did you say that?” Suddenly excitement tinged his voice. “That’s out of the book. Isn’t it? Isn’t it! We’re not really ——” She was a little contrite, but not very. “Well, not really, perhaps. But ’most any place is Bagdad if you don’t know what will happen in it. And this is an adventure, isn’t it, that we’re going on? People in disguise in the Haymarket. Caliphs, and princes, and slaves, and thieves, and good fairies, and witches.” “In the Haymarket! That Pop went to all the time! That is just dumb talk.

Hannah Winter was sixty all of a sudden, as women of sixty are. Just yesterday - or the day before, at most - she had been a bride of twenty in a wine-coloured silk wedding gown, very stiff and rich. And now here she was, all of a sudden, sixty. (...) This is the way it happened! She was rushing along Peacock Alley to meet her daughter Marcia. Anyone who knows Chicago knows that smoke-blackened pile, the Congress Hotel; and anyone who knows the Congress Hotel has walked down that glittering white marble crypt called Peacock Alley. It is neither so glittering nor so white nor, for that matter, so prone to preen itself as it was in the hotel's palmy '90s. But it still serves as a convenient short cut on a day when Chicago's lake wind makes Michigan Boulevard a hazard, and thus Hannah Winter was using it. She was to have met Marcia at the Michigan Boulevard entrance at two, sharp. And here it was 2.07. When Marcia said two, there she was at two, waiting, lips slightly compressed. (...) So then here it was 2.07, and Hannah Winter, rather panicky, was rushing along Peacock Alley, dodging loungers, and bell-boys, and traveling salesmen and visiting provincials and the inevitable red-faced delegates with satin badges. In her hurry and nervous apprehension she looked, as she scuttled down the narrow passage, very much like the Rabbit who was late for the Duchess's dinner. Her rubber-heeled oxfords were pounding down hard on the white marble pavement. Suddenly she saw coming swiftly toward her a woman who seemed strangely familiar - a well-dressed woman, harassed-looking, a tense frown between her eyes, and her eyes staring so that they protruded a little, as one who runs ahead of herself in her haste. Hannah had just time to note, in a flash, that the woman's smart hat was slightly askew and that, though she walked very fast, her trim ankles showed the inflexibility of age, when she saw that the woman was not going to get out of her way. Hannah Winter swerved quickly to avoid a collision. So did the other woman. Next instant Hannah Winter brought up with a crash against her own image in that long and tricky mirror which forms a broad full-length panel set in the marble wall at the north end of Peacock Alley. Passerby and the loungers on near-by red plush seats came running, but she was unhurt except for a forehead bump that remained black-and-blue for two weeks or more. The bump did not bother her, nor did the slightly amused concern of those who had come to her assistance. She stood there, her hat still askew, staring at this woman - this woman with her stiff ankles, her slightly protruding eyes, her nervous frown, her hat a little sideways - this stranger - this murderess who had just slain, ruthlessly and forever, a sallow, high-spirited girl of twenty in a wine-coloured silk wedding gown.

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." --Edna Ferber "The great gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites. It gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination." --Elizabeth Hardwick

Jap.

Well-known stories from literature with top Hollywood actors: Cimarron, by Edna Ferber, starring Irene Dunne; Elmer the Great, by Ring Lardner, starring Bob Hope; The Prairie Years, by Carl Sandburg, starring Gregory Peck;

Maartje Pool kneaded briskly, the color high in her cheeks, what with the vigorous pummeling and rolling, and something else that made her look strangely young for the moment—girlish, almost. “Sure, I liked him, I liked him.” “But you ran away?” “Not far. I came back. Nobody ever knew I ran, even. But I ran. I knew.” “Why did you come back?” Maartje elucidated her philosophy without being in the least aware that it could be called by any such high-sounding name. “You can’t run away far enough. Except you stop living you can’t run away from life.

In Dirk’s absence she would sit before it at night long after the rest of the weary household had gone to bed. Old Pom, the mongrel, lay stretched at her feet enjoying such luxury in old age as he had never dreamed of in his bastard youth.

The modern Hungarian artists, followers of that zigzag nonsense done by Matisse and Picasso and their ilk in Paris.

Things used to be plain and simple; you did a thing and you knew how it would turn out. But not now. The world was changing.

Now, if you've never lived in a small town you will be much amused at the idea of its boasting a smart set. Which proves your ignorance. The small town smart set is deadly serious about its smartness. It likes to take six-hour runs down to the city to fit a pair of shoes and hear Caruso. Its clothes are as well made, and its scandals are as crisp, and its pace as hasty, and its golf club as dull as the clothes, and scandals, and pace, and golf club of its city cousins.

He never has seen Seattle; he says he’s crazy to; he says he doesn’t believe there is any such place or any state called Washington that has a town named Walla Walla.

Yes. All the worth-while things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in candle-light. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures. People—all kinds of people. Work that you love. And growth—growth and watching people grow. Feeling very strongly about things and then developing that feeling to—to make something fine come of it.

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.

Most of them had known little of play in their youth and now they played ponderously and a little sadly and yet eagerly as does one to whom the gift of leisure had come too late.

I was then operating under the Edna Ferber theory: Being an old maid is like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation after you have ceased struggling.

A placated bully is a hand-fed bully.

A whole roomful of Jews is like a charged battery. The vitality sparks seem to fly, and frequently the result is a short circuit.

Multiculturalism--the claim that minority cultures and ways of life should be protected through group rights and privilege--amounts to the Balkanization of this country into blacks, Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics, and so on. It highlights differences and obscures similarities, and it gives each group the idea that it has a special knowledge about itself that no one else can share. How many times have you heard that you have no right to criticize a black (or Latino or Bengali) if you aren't black (or Latino or Bengali)? Multiculturalism is the antithesis of the American melting pot, and quite deliberately so. I've heard black nationalists argue that the melting-pot theory, with the assimilation it demands, is just another racist attempt to "disappear" the black man in America. Multiculturalism is heralded specifically because it keeps people in separate groups. Ironically, if actual multiculturalism--an appreciation for diversity--were in effect today instead of the warped balkanization we have under that label, each of us would be free to embrace a culture other than our own. As a black woman, Paulette Williams would have been celebrating multiculturalism much more distinctly by keeping her own Anglo name. Or perhaps she could have changed her name to Mary O'Reilly or Edna Ferber. Now that would have been real multiculturalism.

and a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

As she threw the bedclothes heroically aside Selina decided that it took an appalling amount of courage—this life that Simeon Peake had called a great adventure.

So Big, Edna Ferber. About mistakes it’s funny. You’ve got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep other people from making theirs they get mad.

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.

That’s it! We belong to the nineteen hundreds, Vaughan, and Dike and Lina and even Madam, old as she is. But Mike and Reggie and kids like that, why, they’re demi-siècle, they’re half century, they belong to the two thousands. It scares you, it sounds so far away—but not to them. They’ll have the job of fixing up all our mistakes, the demi-siècle boys and girls will. We’re tail end of an era.

You’ll be old yourself someday.” “I know it. That’s why I hate ’em.

So Big, Edna Ferber.

Leslie reads too much,