Being a successful person is not necessarily defined by what you have achieved, but by what you have overcome.
I wonder how many people don’t get the one they want, but end up with the one they’re supposed to be with.
Remember, if people talk about you behind your back, it only means you are two steps ahead of them.
Don’t give up before the miracle happens.
The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable.
You know, a heart can be broken, but it keeps on beating, just the same.
If you cage a wild thing, you can be sure it will die, but if you let it run free, nine times out of ten it will run back home.
Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.
It’s funny, when you’re a child you think time will never go by, but when you hit about twenty, time passes like you’re on the fast train to Memphis. I guess life just slips up on everybody. It sure did on me.
You never know what’s in a person’s heart until they’re tested, do you?
If you do everything in your power to avoid writing and still can’t, then you must be a writer.
Are you a politician or does lying just run in your family?
That’s what I’m living on now, honey, dreams, dreams of what I used to do.
Hazel always used to say There’s not enough darkness in the entire universe to snuff out the light of just one little candle.
Being an only child and losing both my parents at an early age, I have found that the friends I have made over the years are the people who help me get through life, good times and bad.
The food in the South is as important as food anywhere because it defines a person’s culture.
You’re just a bee charmer, Idgie Threadgoode. That’s what you are, a bee charmer.
People cain’t help being what they are any more than a skunk can help being a skunk. Don’t you think if they had their choice they would rather be something else? Sure they would. People are just weak.
It’s funny, most people can be around someone and they gradually begin to love them and never know exactly when it happened; but Ruth knew the very second it happened to her. When Idgie had grinned at her and tried to hand her that jar of honey, all these feelings that she had been trying to hold back came flooding through her, and it was at that second in time that she knew she loved Idgie with all her heart.
Marriage. Isn’t it great? Each time you fall back in love with your [spouse] it gets better and better.
I think that people that are not sensitive, who seem to bang through life, do survive, but I don’t think they get the really soaring feelings that people who are more artistically bent can get.
Albert and I would spend hours and hours looking at them. Cleo had this big magnifying glass on his desk, and we’d find centipedes and grasshoppers and beetles and potato bugs, ants . . . and put them in a jar and look at them. They have the sweetest little faces and the cutest expressions. After we’d looked at them all we wanted to, we’d put them in the yard and let them go on about their business.
No matter what you look like, there’s somebody who’s gonna think you’re the handsomest man in the world.
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.
One gal drank a can of floor wax and topped it off with a cup of Clorox, trying to separate herself from the same world he was in.
