168 Quotes by Edna Ferber

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

Funny, isn’t it, how your whole life goes by while you think you’re only planning the way you’re going to live it?

A life like this develops the comedy sense. You can’t play tragedy while you’re living it.

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

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.

America – rather, the United States – seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warmhearted, overfriendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures. Its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The schnuckle among the nations of the world.

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

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.

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?