Quotes from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you are two steps ahead.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“I wonder how many people don't get the one they want, but end up with the one they're supposed to be with.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“You know, a heart can be broken, but it keeps on beating, just the same.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“The ones that hurt the most always say the least.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“Face it girls. I'm older and I have more insurance.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“Are you a politician or does lying just run in your family?”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“You never know what's in a person's heart until they're tested, do you?”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“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.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“I believe in God, but I don't think you have to go crazy to prove it.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“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.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“No matter what you look like, there's somebody who's gonna think you're the handsomest man in the world.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“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.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“You're just a bee charmer, Idgie Threadgoode. That's what you are, a bee charmer.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“That's what I'm living on now, honey, dreams, dreams of what I used to do.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“What was this power, this insidious threat, this invisible gun to her head that controlled her life . . . this terror of being called names?
She had stayed a virgin so she wouldn't be called a tramp or a slut; had married so she wouldn't be called an old maid; faked orgasms so she wouldn't be called frigid; had children so she wouldn't be called barren; had not been a feminist because she didn't want to be called queer and a man hater; never nagged or raised her voice so she wouldn't be called a bitch . . .
She had done all that and yet, still, this stranger had dragged her into the gutter with the names that men call women when they are angry.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“Oh it don't make no kind of sense. Big ol' ox like Grady won't sit next to a colored child. But he eats eggs- shoot right outta chicken's ass!”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“You know, a heart can be broken, but it still keeps a-beating just the same.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“Lately, it had been an endless procession of long, black nights and gray mornings, when her sense of failure swept over her like a five-hundred-pound wave; and she was scared. But it wasn't death that she feared. She had looked down into that black pit of death and had wanted to jump in, once too often. As a matter of fact, the thought began to appeal to her more and more.

She even knew how she would kill herself. It would be with a silver bullet. As round and as smooth as an ice-cold blue martini. She would place the gun in the freezer for a few hours before she did it, so it would feel frosty and cold against her head. She could almost feel the ice-cold bullet shooting through her hot, troubled brain, freezing the pain for good. The sound of the gun blast would be the last sound she would ever hear. And then... nothing. Maybe just the silent sound that a bird might hear, flying in the clean, cool air, high above the earth. The sweet, pure air of freedom.

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.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“There are magnificent beings on this earth, son, that are walking around posing as humans.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“And so, as quietly as he had lived, he slipped out of town, leaving only a note behind:

Well, that's that. I'm off, and if you don't believe I'm leaving, just count the days I'm gone. When you hear the phone not ringing, it'll be me that's not calling. Goodbye, old girl, and good luck.

Yours truly,
Earl Adcock

P.S. I'm not deaf.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“I believe poor people are good people, except the ones that are mean . . .”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“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.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“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.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“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.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“It was a stretch to imagine that Barbara Walters might want to give it all up for Ed Couch, but Evelyn tried her hardest. Of course, even though she was not religious, it was a comfort to know that the Bible backed her up in being a doormat.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“I brought a picture with me that I had at home, of a girl in a swing with a castle and pretty blue bubbles in the background, to hang in my room, but that nurse here said the girl was naked from the waist up and not appropriate. You know, I've had that picture for fifty years and I never knew she was naked. If you ask me, I don't think the old men they've got here can see well enough to notice that she's bare-breasted. But, this is a Methodist home, so she's in the closet with my gallstones.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“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.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“… but she never did cry. She was too hurt to cry.… You know, a heart can be broken, but it keeps on beating, just the same.”
― Fannie Flagg, quote from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

About the author

Popular quotes

“I leave the world in terrible turmoil. I come back, same turmoil. Nothing at all different. Well, outfits are a little different...”
― Joss Whedon, quote from Astonishing X-Men, Volume 1: Gifted

“It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000). The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between “I wrote” and “I have written.” The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care [all cited in The New York Times, June 18, 1989]. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. “Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist” [The Miracle of Language, page 54]. On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaître and kennen) and knowledge that results from understanding (savoir and wissen). Portuguese has words that differentiate between an interior angle and an exterior one. All the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of. The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the Danish hygge (meaning “instantly satisfying and cozy”), the French sang-froid, the Russian glasnost, or the Spanish macho, so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment. At the same time, some languages have words that we may be pleased to do without. The existence in German of a word like schadenfreude (taking delight in the misfortune of others) perhaps tells us as much about Teutonic sensitivity as it does about their neologistic versatility. Much the same could be said about the curious and monumentally unpronounceable Highland Scottish word sgiomlaireachd, which means “the habit of dropping in at mealtimes.” That surely conveys a world of information about the hazards of Highland life—not to mention the hazards of Highland orthography. Of”
― Bill Bryson, quote from The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

“A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even when she longs to serve herself or her children. She has to put him first even if she longs to judge for herself. She has to put him first even when she knows best. To be a good wife is to be a woman with a will of iron that you yourself have forged into a bridle to curb your own abilities. To be a good wife is to enslave yourself to a lesser person. To be a good wife is to amputate your own power as surely as the parents of beggars hack off their children's feet for the greater benefit of the family.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Other Queen

“Baird couldn’t understand why she was being so stubborn. Didn’t she feel the heat flare between them every time they touched? Didn’t she realize it was a by product of the bonding that would soon take place between them? Because he was determined to bond her to him. And no matter how much she protested and struggled, he knew Olivia wanted him as much as he wanted her—she just didn’t know it yet. But how can she not know, damn it? They’d been dream-sharing for the past six Earth months. He’d watched her go about her day to day activities in his visions of her, had seen how she stood up to those in authority and felt her compassion for her patients as she tended them. Watching her life was all that had kept him going while he was imprisoned in the dark hell hole of the Scourge Fathership. Absorbing her emotions had started the beginnings of his bond to her. He knew she’d experienced the same thing so how could she deny it—and him—now? Baird didn’t know but it looked like he was in for the long haul with his bride. He thought longingly of some of the other Earth brides he’d heard of. The human women weren’t cold like those of Tranquil Prime or dangerously fierce like those of Rageron. Often they submitted at once—some didn’t even wait a single night before giving themselves completely to the Kindred warriors that called them. But it seemed that Olivia wasn’t going to be that kind of woman. She would make him work for every inch of progress. Well, so be it. Baird had never been afraid of hard work and there was no way he was going to give her up. If she wanted a battle, she’d get one, he decided as he pulled the stubborn little human closer. She”
― Evangeline Anderson, quote from Claimed

“I swallowed. “Mum, you’re not going to get divorced, are you?” Her eyes shot open. “Divorced? I’m a good Catholic girl, Louisa. We don’t divorce. We just make our men suffer for all eternity.” She waited just for a moment, and then she started to laugh.”
― Jojo Moyes, quote from After You

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.