Edna Ferber Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“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!”
-- Edna Ferber -
“In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“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 -
“Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.”
-- 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.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“A woman can look both moral and exciting... if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“If American politics are too dirty for women to take part in, there's something wrong with American politics.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“I never would just open a door and walk through, I had to bust it down for the hell of it. I just naturally liked doing things the hard way.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“To be alive is a fine thing. It is the finest thing in the world, though hazardous. It is a unique thing. It happens only once in a lifetime. To be alive, to know consciously that you are alive, and to relish that knowledge -- this is a kind of magic. Or it may be a kind of madness, exhilarating but harmless.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“But I have felt that to be a Jew was, in some ways at least, to be especially privileged.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“A whole roomful of Jews is like a charged battery. The vitality sparks seem to fly, and frequently the result is a short circuit.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“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 -
“One can summon courage and fortitude to face tragedy; irritations and frustrations are a cloud of mosquitoes that nip and sting and drive one frantic.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“Housework's the hardest work in the world. That's why men won't do it.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“Roast Beef, Medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy. ... Roast Beef, Medium, is safe, and sane, and sure.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“don't you hate people who say they're not complaining and then complain?”
-- Edna Ferber -
“There are people who have a penchant for cities-more than that, a talent for them, a gift of sensing them, of feeling their rhythm and pulsebeats, as others have a highly developed music sense, or color reaction. It is a thing that cannot be acquired.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“The goat's business is none of the sheep's concern.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“Does one eat peanuts at a ball game?' 'It ain't hardly legal if you don't.”
-- Edna Ferber -
“Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse.”
-- Edna Ferber