Edna Ferber Quotes (22 Quotes)

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.

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. . . . But amusing Never.

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.

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

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.

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 entrTes, the hors d'oeuvres, and the things a la though you know that Roast Beef, medium, is safe and sane, and sure.

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

A closed mind is a dying mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.