Quotes from Edna Ferber

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.

What can death do to you at ninety that life hasn't done to you already!

savages. Dirty savages.

Things used to be plain and simple; you did a thing and you knew how it would turn out. But not now. The world was changing.

Bigger. Biggest ranch. Biggest steer. Biggest houses. Biggest hat. Biggest state. A mania for bigness. What littleness did it hide?

Whoever heard of a woman having to enter her house past a row of guns! These weren't Indian days—pioneer scalping days.

That's it! We belong to the nineteen hundreds, Vaughan, and Dike and Lina and even Madam, old as she is. But Mike and Reggie and kids like that, why, they're demi-siècle, they're half century, they belong to the two thousands. It scares you, it sounds so far away—but not to them. They'll have the job of fixing up all our mistakes, the demi-siècle boys and girls will. We're tail end of an era.

In Dirk's absence she would sit before it at night long after the rest of the weary household had gone to bed. Old Pom, the mongrel, lay stretched at her feet enjoying such luxury in old age as he had never dreamed of in his bastard youth.

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.

A placated bully is a hand-fed bully.

Now, if you've never lived in a small town you will be much amused at the idea of its boasting a smart set. Which proves your ignorance. The small town smart set is deadly serious about its smartness. It likes to take six-hour runs down to the city to fit a pair of shoes and hear Caruso. Its clothes are as well made, and its scandals are as crisp, and its pace as hasty, and its golf club as dull as the clothes, and scandals, and pace, and golf club of its city cousins.

You'll be old yourself someday." "I know it. That's why I hate 'em.

A whole roomful of Jews is like a charged battery. The vitality sparks seem to fly, and frequently the result is a short circuit.

Some of his newly acquired knowledge brought pain, as knowledge is apt to do.

Reata," he said two decades later

Leslie reads too much

He never has seen Seattle; he says he's crazy to; he says he doesn't believe there is any such place or any state called Washington that has a town named Walla Walla.

People permit life to slide past them like a deft pickpocket, their purse-not yet missed and now too late-in his hand.

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

Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse.

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

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.

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

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