Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

by Fannie Flagg

I guess life just slips up on everybody. It sure did on me. One day I was a little girl and the next I was a grown woman, with bosoms and hair on my private parts. I missed the whole thing.

I believe poor people are good people, except the ones that are mean…and they’d be mean even if they were rich.

She had been a good girl, had always acted like a lady, never raised her voice, always deferred to everybody and everything. She had assumed that somewhere down the line there would be a reward for that; a prize.

She wasn’t sure she loved Ed all that much, but she loved him just enough to not want to lose him.

No, it wasn’t death she was afraid of. It was this life of hers that was beginning to remind her of that gray intensive care waiting room.

Eva had the extreme luxury in life of not caring about what people thought of her.

“You know, I’m thankful that my Cleo passed on first. It seems like a man cain’t live without a woman. That’s why most of them die right after their wives do. They just get lost.

Now, a murder is usually just a one-time thing—mostly over some woman, not a repeat crime. But a thief is a thief until the day he dies.”

“Well, yes, sometimes I do. Of course, all my people are gone…but once in a while, some of the ones from the church come to see me, but it’s just hello and goodbye. That’s just the way it is, hello and goodbye. “Sometimes I look at my picture of Cleo and little Albert and wonder what they’re up to…and dream about the old days.”

His main problem in life, at the moment, was that he loved too well and not too wisely.

She said, Miss Ruth is a lady and always knew when to leave a party, and this wasn’t going to be any exception as long as she was around.

Must be getting old or crazy…my other half, Wilbur, came home three days in a row, complaining of a headache…and is there anything worse than a man who has a little pain? Guess that’s why we have the babies…

He had mourned each of those great trains as, one by one, they were pulled off the lines and left to rust in some yard, like old aristocrats, fading away; antique relics of times gone by.

She was the kind of woman you could kill for; the thought of anything or anybody hurting her made him sick to his stomach.

The ones that hurt the most always say the least.