Edna Ferber Quotes

98 Sourced Quotes

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

Edna Ferber
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.

Edna Ferber
There is no denying the fact that writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

Edna Ferber
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.

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

Edna Ferber
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.

Edna Ferber
Life really can't ever utterly 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
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.

Edna Ferber
Young folks don't want you to understand 'em. You've got no more right to understand them than you have to play their games or wear their clothes. They belong to themselves.

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

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

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

Edna Ferber
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.

Edna Ferber
She mistook his stolidness for depth, and it was a long time before she realized that his silence was not due to the weight of his thoughts but to the fact that he had nothing to say.

Edna Ferber
He said that the war had disillusioned him. It was a word you often heard uttered as a reason or an excuse for abandoning the normal. "Disillusioned."

Edna Ferber
Gussie's mother was a real mother — the kind that wakes up when you come home.

Edna Ferber
Here were blood, lust, love, passion. Here were warmth, enchantment, laughter, music. It was Anodyne. It was Lethe. It was Escape. It was the Theater.

Edna Ferber
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.

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

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

Edna Ferber
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.

Edna Ferber
Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.

Edna Ferber
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.

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

Edna Ferber
She would live again her own past, drinking deep though she knew it would not slake her thirst, as a wanderer in the desert drinks of the alkaline water because there is no other.

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

Edna Ferber
This wasn't conversation. This was oral death...

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

Edna Ferber
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!

Edna Ferber