Top 150 Fannie Flagg Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I have a lot of friends that are ex-Miss Alabamas and ex-Miss Georgias.”

— Fannie Flagg

52. “If you do everything in your power to avoid writing and still can’t, then you must be a writer.”

— Fannie Flagg

53. “Ida had always been different. At school, when all the kids used to play church, and one would be the preacher, another the preacher’s wife, a deacon, and the choir leader, and some would be the parishioners who had come to the church, Ida said she wanted to be God, because she was the only one who knew how to do it. Of.”

— Fannie Flagg

54. “Almost losing one person you love shines a bright spotlight on life, and suddenly strips you of everything but your real feelings.”

— Fannie Flagg

55. “It’s funny, most people can be around someone and they gradually begin to love them and never know exactly when it happened; but Ruth knew the very second it happened to her. When Idgie had grinned at her and tried to hand her that jar of honey, all these feelings that she had been trying to hold back came flooding through her, and it was at that second in time that she knew she loved Idgie with all her heart.”

— Fannie Flagg

56. “People didn’t call blacks names anymore, at least not to their faces. Italians weren’t wops or dagos, and there were no more kikes, Japs, chinks, or spics in polite conversation. Everybody had a group to protest and stick up for them. But women were still being called names by men. Why? Where was our group? It’s not fair.”

— Fannie Flagg

57. “All those calm, adult discussions. When all she really wanted to do was scream for her momma, her sweet momma, the one person in the world who loved her better than anyone ever would or ever could.”

— Fannie Flagg

58. “Oh no, honey. Lots of women go through it early. Why, there was this woman over in Georgia who was only thirty-six-years-old and one day she got in her car and drove right up the stairs to the county courthouse, rolled down her window, and tossed her mother’s head that she had just chopped off in her kitchen at a State policeman and hollered, “Here! This is what you wanted,” and drove right back down the courthouse stairs. Now that’s what an early menopause will do for you if you’re not careful.”

— Fannie Flagg

59. “There are magnificent beings on this earth, son, that are walking around posing as humans. And I don’t ever want you to forget that. You hear me?”

— Fannie Flagg

60. “They say the truth can set you free, but sometimes it can really depress the hell out of you.”

— Fannie Flagg

61. “I believe in God, but I don’t think you have to go crazy to prove it.” – Smokeys dad, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.”

— Fannie Flagg

62. “Women are fools; they will marry anything that has a heartbeat just to have a man.”

— Fannie Flagg

63. “In order to be Miss Anybody you had to have excellent grades, and I had terrible grades because of my dyslexia.”

— Fannie Flagg

64. “If you did tell the truth or if you didn’t, there were always consequences. Human interaction was difficult at best.”

— Fannie Flagg

65. “Evelyn leaned out her window and calmly said, “Let’s face it, honey, I’m older than you are and have more insurance than you do,” and drove away.”

— Fannie Flagg

66. “I don’t know. I just feel all wicky-wacky. I’m just thrown for a loop and back. I can’t even think about what to do.”

— Fannie Flagg

67. “It was the story of her life and probably how she had survived this long: with a little talent and a lot of flair.”

— Fannie Flagg

68. “Depression years come back to me now as the happy times, even though we were all struggling. We were happy and didn’t know it.”

— Fannie Flagg

69. “I longed to be a writer, always wanted to be a writer.”

— Fannie Flagg

70. “Mildred had had a few men friends after that, but she never really loved any of them. None could ever compete with the one that got away.”

— Fannie Flagg

71. “I’m telling you, Dena, when you live long enough to see your children begin to look at you with different eyes, and you can look at them not as your children, but as people, it’s worth getting older with all the creaks and wrinkles.”

— Fannie Flagg

72. “Oswald welcomed the cooler weather because in the following days he discovered it brought winter sunsets, and the river sunsets were different from anything else he had ever seen. They mesmerized him.”

— Fannie Flagg

73. “Buddy, night and day. We even started calling her Cupid. Idgie was.”

— Fannie Flagg

74. “Just like two and two always add up to four, kindness and forgiveness is always right, hate and revenge is always wrong. It’s a fail-proof system; if you just stick to that one simple rule, why, you couldn’t make a mistake if you tried.”

— Fannie Flagg

75. “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?’ Luke 12:25.”

— Fannie Flagg

76. “I think that people that are not sensitive, who seem to bang through life, do survive, but I don’t think they get the really soaring feelings that people who are more artistically bent can get.”

— Fannie Flagg

77. “You think people are some kind of pure, white feathered birds flying in the clouds. They’re not. They’re pigs and they love to wallow in the mud and dirt.”

— Fannie Flagg

78. “History was being rewritten by the minute. All of his childhood heroes were now being viewed as villains, their lives judged in hindsight by the current fad of political correctness.”

— Fannie Flagg

79. “You know, life can be hard sometimes. And I sort of think animals are little gifts the good Lord sends to help us get through it. Lady sure did that for me.”

— Fannie Flagg

80. “I just think humiliation really causes more harm than maybe being physically beaten.”

— Fannie Flagg

81. “A person lives for years, touches so many people, and then at the end winds up just a small picture and a few paragraphs in the paper, the paper gets thrown away, and it’s all over.”

— Fannie Flagg

82. “Men are necessary up to a point, but women are the natural leaders in society and in the home.”

— Fannie Flagg

83. “Those memories were still there, and tonight, he sat searching for them, just like always, grabbing at moonbeams. Every once in a while he would catch one and take a ride, and it was like magic.”

— Fannie Flagg

84. “With the last of the sun fading, he could see the reflection of the green lights on the docks across the way and the stars twinkling in the river like small diamonds. What a show. This was better than any movie he had ever seen, and it was different every night. It was so wonderful at times he felt he wanted to do something about it, to try and stop time, make it last longer, but he didn’t know what to do.”

— Fannie Flagg

85. “You cain’t dwell on sadness, oh, it’ll make you sick faster than anything in this world.”

— Fannie Flagg

86. “Now, I’m not saying they can help it, all I am saying is that in order for this world to keep on progressing the women have got to run things. The trick is to do it without them knowing it.”

— Fannie Flagg

87. “His idea of how the country was doing had been determined by the size of the butts he picked up off the sidewalk.”

— Fannie Flagg

88. “And as far as Norma was concerned, that was the main problem with life. You never knew what was going to happen from minute to minute, and more than anything in this world, Norma hated a surprise.”

— Fannie Flagg

89. “When she finally was able to order a martini, the first sip nearly knocked her head off. It was so strong. And how surprised she was that scotch tasted more like iodine than butterscotch candy. Two of the great disappointments in her life.”

— Fannie Flagg

90. “We must be kind and forgive one another or we won’t survive. But even among the most religious there seems to be a great blind spot covering the world, an inability to learn from past experience. Civilization is as precarious as a sand castle. All the care and effort it took to create it can be knocked down in a second by some bully or another. And the world is full of bullies.”

— Fannie Flagg

91. “They also learned that the very best way to start a marriage was with a good laugh. Particularly when the children start coming.”

— Fannie Flagg

92. “Seated in a car full of women, squashed between his six-foot landlady and Sybil Underwood, having to listen to them talk nonstop all the way to Atlanta and back, was too much for him to bear.”

— Fannie Flagg

93. “On every door the management had placed a photograph of the person so they could find their room. As he went by he saw face after face of someone who used to be young.”

— Fannie Flagg

94. “And when you wonder where I am, just look up at the sun and that’s where I’ll be.”

— Fannie Flagg

95. “And for those like Norma and Macky, born and raised in the forties and fifties, it was such a drastic change from that era when everyone felt safe, and your only knowledge of the Middle East was a picture on a Christmas card of a bright star shining down on a peaceful manger, not the place full of hate and rage they saw daily on the television and read about in the newspapers.”

— Fannie Flagg

96. “Even when I was failing math and everything else and I was feeling so bad about myself, you sat down with me and said, “Honey, there are those who do well at math, and then there are those, like yourself, who have been blessed with a creative mind and a wonderful imagination. I just know you are going on to do great things.” You’ll never know how you changed my life that day.”

— Fannie Flagg

97. “Brave girls don’t cry.”

— Fannie Flagg

98. “In the movies, it was always the bad guys that got killed, and the good guys lived happily forever.”

— Fannie Flagg

99. “I think most people are confused about life, because it’s not just one thing going on,” said Elner. “It’s many things going on at the same time. Life is both sad and happy, simple and complex, all at the same time.”

— Fannie Flagg

100. “Oh, I know a lot of people struggle, wondering is there really a God. They sit and think and worry over it all their life. The good Lord had to make smart people but I don’t think he did them any favors because it seems the smart ones start questioning things from the get go. But I never did. I’m one of the lucky ones. I thank God every night, my brain is just perfect for me, not too dumb, not too bright.”

— Fannie Flagg