Quotes from Edna Ferber

Men often marry their mothers.

Roast beef, medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy.

We no longer build fireplaces for physical warmth—we build them for the warmth of the soul; we build them to dream by, to hope by, to home by.

A story must simmer in its own juice for months or even years before it's ready to serve.

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

But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

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!

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

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.

For equipment she had youth, curiosity, a steel strong frame...four hundred ninety-seven dollars; and a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps, painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and Burgundy, crysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.

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

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

Whoever said love conquers all was a fool. Because almost everything conquers love - or tries to.

Any piece of furniture, I don't care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated..., and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character, Selina said.

A closed mind is a dying mind.

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

I'm not much to look at, replied Elizabeth, but I'm beautiful inside.

About mistakes it's funny. You've got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs, they get mad.

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.

A closed country is a dying country... A closed mind is a dying mind.' from a radio broadcast in 1947

It's fun telling you tall Texas tales. You always look like a little girl who's hearing Cinderella for the first time.

If it's freedom you want, come to Texas. No one there tells you what to do and how you have to do it.

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.

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.