Quotes from Edna Ferber

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.

A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.

There are only two kinds of people in the world that really count. One kind's wheat and the other kind's emerald.

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?

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?

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.

Yes. All the worth-while things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in candle-light. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures. People—all kinds of people. Work that you love. And growth—growth and watching people grow. Feeling very strongly about things and then developing that feeling to—to make

with superb courage, and the decision and intelligence of a man.

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

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

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

It is given to very few women to know the beauty of a man's real friendship.

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.

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.

Even their voices go up at the end of a declarative sentence

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

The room was in almost comic disorder. It was a room in which a struggle has taken place between its occupant and that burning-eyed hag, Sleeplessness. The hag, it was plain, had won.

where Chicago's vast and growing Negro population shifted and moved and stretched its great limbs ominously, reaching out and out in protest and overflowing the bounds that irked it. Her serene face and her quiet manner, her bland interest and friendly look protected her.

You can run, but what are you running from? Your life? You can't run away from your life.

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.

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.

JARED DIBBLE Gone to Heaven Like a sign on an office door. Out for lunch. Back at two.

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

Jane Austen. Anyway, I'm not