Best 94 quotes of Edna Ferber on MyQuotes

A closed mind is a dying mind.

All the difference in the world between the movies and the thrill I get out of a play at the theater. Ay, yes! Like fooling around with paper dolls when you could be playing with a real live baby.

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.

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.

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.

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 by servants, and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character ... A good deal like human beings.

A placated bully is a hand-fed bully.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

But almost any place is Baghdad if you don't know what will happen in it.

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

celebratin' New Year's Eve is like eatin' oranges. You got to let go your dignity t' really enjoy 'em.

Cherry cobbler is shortcake with a soul.

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

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

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.

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?

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

... 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.

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

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 don't know what it is that makes a writer go to his desk in his shut-off room day after day after year after year unless it is the sure knowledge that not to have done the daily stint of writing that day is infinitely more agonizing than to write.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Most of the men regarded Europe as a wine list. In their mental geography Rheims, Rhine, Moselle, Bordeaux, Champagne, or Würzburg were not localities but libations.

Nicknames are fond names. We do not give them to people we dislike.

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.

Now gae your wa'sTho'anes as gude As ever happit flesh and blude, Yet part we maunthe case sae hard is, Amang the writers and the bardies That lang they'll brook the auld I trow, Or neibours cry,'Weel brook the new'.