A Kind of Magic Quotes

“A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic

“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, A Kind of Magic

“Deep deep down, I think I went back to Texas because I thought this strange commonwealth exemplified the qualities which must not be permitted to infect the other forty-seven states if the whole of the United States as a great nation was to remain a whole country and a great nation.”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography

“The human race was a non-destructible miracle. I had just witnessed a kind of magic.”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography

“They forgot the cotton fields, the wheat fields, the cornfields. They forgot the coal mines, the potato patch, the stable, the barn, the shed. They forgot the labor under the pitiless blaze of the noonday sun; the bitter marrow-numbing chill of winter; the blistered skin; the frozen road; wind, snow, rain, flood. The women forgot for an hour their washtubs, the kitchen stoves, childbirth pains, drudgery, worry, disappointment. Here were blood, lust, love, passion. Here were warmth, enchantment, laughter, music. It was Anodyne. It was Lethe. It was Escape. It was the Theatre.’ ” He had recited from memory a full half of Page 104 in Show Boat.”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography

“A man in the hideous striped pants and top of the Buchenwald prisoner’s uniform—the liberation had been so recent that other clothing was not yet available—now yielded to an inner urge so antic as to chill the onlooker’s blood even more than had the gruesome sights we had just beheld. In health and in normal life he must have been a tall man, and hearty, fiftyish perhaps, and of dignified bearing. A businessman, a lawyer, or of another of the professions. He was stooped now. His shoulders and chest had slumped into his abdomen which was flabby, not fat at all. He resembled a walking withered gourd. In the chaos that followed the liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, and in the scrounging that must have followed upon that, this once sedate and intelligent man had somehow come upon a high silk hat such as men sometimes wear to the opera or to a wedding, or another formal occasion. Perhaps a mischievous serviceman had come upon it, and given it to him. With it was a fine ebony and gold-headed walking stick. The man rubbed the nap of the foolish headgear round and round with the fore-sleeve of his striped and hideous jacket; round and round. He had owned one of these articles of headgear in a former day, and knew how to handle it. Now he clapped it on his head at a rakish angle. He had got hold of a cigarette. He was shoeless. Thus accoutered, puffing the cigarette and flicking the ash elegantly, gold-headed cane in hand, he stepped down the dusty road toward the city of Weimar and its burghers who had claimed to be quite unaware of the presence of this man and millions like him; and of the stinking gas chambers and the ovens so near the lovely city of Weimar. You knew that this man now was bereft of the dignity and sense which once had been his. He was grinning as he walked, but the face had, too, a kind of noble decency and you could no longer watch as the grotesque figure padded down the road in its futile gesture of defiance.”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography

“Many remained, waiting for possible planning; or because they were too emaciated, too nearly dead to make moving possible.”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography

“Two more incidents only. Who enjoys writing about the Second World War? Not I. Who enjoys reading about the Second World War? Not you. It must be written. It should be read.”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography

“The bomb-plowed fields now were being renewed by men and women hitched like animals to crude wooden plows. Busy, busy, busy, intent on their own lives, concentrating on the business of surviving,”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography

“For more than four centuries the big bounding Atlantic Ocean and the vast tumultuous Pacific Ocean had successfully barred marauders from our wide open doors. From the security and richness of our ocean and mountain fastness we could stand on the front porch and safely shout, “You can’t catch me! You dassn’t touch me! My father is bigger than your father. My daddy can lick your daddy, only he doesn’t even want to.” But that was before Science had completely banished the distance that once existed between the borders of the Atlantic the Pacific and all the oceans and mountains and lands of the planet Earth; and had filled the air of the universe with potential death deliverable to millions of people at any moment in a single gesture.”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography

“But the observation, the emotions, the impact, the significance of all that I had seen and felt and learned was inherent in the majority of the books that emerged from that typewriter, page by page.”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography

“all. I took no actual part in all these worthy lives or in any group devoted to this uplifting effort.”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography

“They were among the first to denounce the ruthless Grabbers.”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic: An Autobiography

“A placated bully is a hand-fed bully.”
― Edna Ferber, A Kind of Magic