168 Quotes by Edna Ferber

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

In his way and in his day he was a very modern father. "I want you to see all kinds," he would say to her. "I want you to realize that this whole thing is just a grand adventure. A fine show. The trick is to play in it and look at it at the same time.""What whole thing?""Living. All mixed up. The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they're not pleasant things. That's living....

A woman can look both moral and exciting — if she also looks as if it were quite a struggle.' quoted in Reader's Digest interview in 1954

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?

Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.

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.

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

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

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.