Top 100 Edna Ferber Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “I suppose it is a gift, being young, but it isn’t special. We’ve all got it, early in life.”

— Edna Ferber

53. “Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.”

— Edna Ferber

54. “People in big empty places are likely to behave very much as the gods did on Olympus.”

— Edna Ferber

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

— Edna Ferber

56. “There are two ways of doing battle against Disgrace. You may live it down; or you may run away from it and hide. The first method is heart-breaking, but sure. The second cannot be relied upon because of the uncomfortable way Disgrace has of turning up at your heels.”

— Edna Ferber

57. “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

58. “A placated bully is a hand-fed bully.”

— Edna Ferber

59. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

60. “But almost any place is Baghdad if you don’t know what will happen in it.”

— Edna Ferber

61. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

62. “If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there’s something wrong with American politics.”

— Edna Ferber

63. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

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

— Edna Ferber

65. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

69. “Jane Austen. Anyway, I’m not.”

— Edna Ferber

70. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

71. “There’s no sauce for play like work.”

— Edna Ferber

72. “The very rich and the very social are, often, the very stuffy.”

— Edna Ferber

73. “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

74. “A closed country is a dying country... A closed mind is a dying mind.′ from a radio broadcast in 1947.”

— Edna Ferber

75. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

76. “Opinion! If every one had so little tact as to give their true opinion when it was asked this would be a miserable world.”

— Edna Ferber

77. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

78. “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’.”

— Edna Ferber

79. “You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself.”

— Edna Ferber

80. “Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing – for life itself is a writer’s love until death.”

— Edna Ferber

81. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

82. “I’m not much to look at”, replied Elizabeth, “but I’m beautiful inside.”

— Edna Ferber

83. “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?”

— Edna Ferber

84. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

85. “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

86. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

87. “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

88. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

89. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

90. “You can run, but what are you running from? Your life? You can’t run away from your life.”

— Edna Ferber

91. “It is given to very few women to know the beauty of a man’s real friendship.”

— Edna Ferber

92. “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?”

— Edna Ferber

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

— Edna Ferber

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

— Edna Ferber

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

— Edna Ferber

96. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

97. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

98. “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.”

— Edna Ferber

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

— Edna Ferber

100. “A life like this develops the comedy sense. You can’t play tragedy while you’re living it.”

— Edna Ferber