Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe Quotes

“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 know, a heart can be broken, but it keeps on beating, just the same.”

“Idgie used to do all kinds of crazy harebrained things just to get a laugh. She put poker chips in the collection basket at the Baptist church once. She was a character all right, but how anybody could ever have thought that she killed that man is beyond me.”

“I, for one, am delighted at the new addition to our busy street. Just think, now you can mail a letter, have a meal, and get your hair done all on the same block.”

“The night she and Ed went to their thirtieth high school reunion, she had been hoping she’d find someone to talk to about what she was feeling. But all the other women there were just as confused as she was, and held on to their husbands and their drinks to keep themselves from disappearing.”

“I wonder how many people don’t get the one they want, but end up with the one they’re supposed to be with.”

“The quiet hysteria and awful despair had started when she finally began to realize that nothing was ever going to change, that nobody would be coming for her to take her away. She began to feel as if she were at the bottom of a well, screaming, no one to hear.”

“That’s what I’m living on now, honey, dreams, dreams of what I used to do.”

“The Whistle Stop Cafe opened up last week, right next door to me at the post office, and owners Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison said business has been good ever since. Idgie says that for people who know her not to worry about getting poisoned, she is not cooking.”

“If there is such a thing as complete happiness, it is knowing that you are in the right place.”

“But then, she had always admired them, their strength and compassion. She had always wondered how they could love and care for white children and nurse old white men and women with such gentleness and care. She didn’t think she could have.”

“Come to think of it, Idgie and Ruth bought the café in 1929, right in the height of the Depression…but at the café, those Depression years come back to me now as the happy times, even though we were all struggling. We were happy and didn’t know it.”

“You know, it’s funny what you’ll miss when you’re away from home. Now me, I miss the smell of coffee...and bacon frying in the morning.”

“Evelyn was a miserable and resentful wife before she met Mrs. Threadgoode at the Rose Terrance Nursing Home. Before their meeting, she often thought about committing suicide because she was so unhappy and depressed with the way her life was going.”

“Idgie smiled back (...) and looked up into the clear blue sky that reflected in her eyes, and she was as happy as anybody who is in love in the summertime can be.”

“I believe in God, but I don’t think you have to go crazy to prove it.”

“There was something about Idgie that was like a wild animal. She wouldn’t let anybody get too close to her. When she thought that somebody like her too much, she’d just take off in the woods.”

“I’m too young to be old and too old to be young. I just don’t fit anywhere.”

One day you’re young and the next day your bosoms and your chin drops and you’re wearing a rubber girdle. But you don’t know you’re old.

“Honey, that’s one thing you be sure and you get on right away, is your Medicaid, you don’t want to be caught without that.”