Edna Ferber Quotes

98 Sourced Quotes

She never gave up hope of stiffening the spine of the invertebrate Hermie.

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

Edna Ferber
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.

Edna Ferber
It is a curious fact that people permit life to slide past them like a deft pickpocket, their purse — not yet missed and now too late — in his hand.

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
You're through in pictures, and plays, and vaudeville, and radio, and everything! You're a corpse, and you don't know it. Go get yourself buried.

Edna Ferber
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.

Edna Ferber
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.

Edna Ferber
Writing, to be memorable, must be done in a state of impassioned serenity.

Edna Ferber
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.

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

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

Edna Ferber
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.

Edna Ferber
It was part of the Texas ritual. We're rich as son-of-a-bitch stew but look how homely we are, just as plain-folksy as Grandpappy back in 1836. We know about champagne and caviar but we talk hog and hominy.

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

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

Edna Ferber
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 laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt?

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

Edna Ferber
Tulsa, oil capital of the world, as it calls itself, is a tough, get-rich-quick, heady town about as sensitive as corduroy.

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
Don't you believe 'em when they say that what you don't know won't hurt you. Biggest lie ever was.

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

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

Edna Ferber
There is something I want to say to you. I've wanted to say it for years. World, I love you. I have always loved you … or almost always.

Edna Ferber