"Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets"
About this Quote
Edna Ferber cuts through a perennial American confusion: equating magnitude with merit. The line uses the garden to expose the fallacy. A sunflower is tall, brash, and visible from a distance; a violet is low to the ground, intricate, and easily overlooked. Beauty, meaning, and worth are not proportional to height or spectacle. They arise from form, fragrance, texture, and the fit between a thing and its place.
Ferber returned again and again to the national cult of bigness. She reported on the Midwest, watched Chicago thrust up its skyscrapers, and later wrote about oil wealth and sprawling ranches in Giant. Even her Pulitzer winner bore the teasing title So Big, a story that questioned whether size, money, and public renown could ever substitute for taste, integrity, and the courage to do difficult, unglamorous work. The aphorism distills that critique. It resists the lazy scoreboard that counts only what is easy to count.
There is a social angle embedded in the floral imagery. Violets have long symbolized modesty; their virtues are quiet. Ferber’s fiction dignifies people whose labor feeds and clothes others, whose art refines perception, whose decency keeps communities intact. Such contributions rarely dominate the horizon like sunflowers, yet they shape the texture of daily life. She suggests a recalibration of attention: notice what is small, patient, and carefully made; it may be better, not in volume, but in value.
The line is also a warning about visibility. Large things cast shadows and drown out subtler notes. In an age addicted to metrics — followers, square footage, market cap, megapixels — the temptation to mistake scale for excellence is stronger than ever. Ferber offers a different standard. Let the measure be depth, not height; quality, not quantity. Sunflowers and violets are both flowers. One does not invalidate the other. The world needs the quiet as much as the grand.
Ferber returned again and again to the national cult of bigness. She reported on the Midwest, watched Chicago thrust up its skyscrapers, and later wrote about oil wealth and sprawling ranches in Giant. Even her Pulitzer winner bore the teasing title So Big, a story that questioned whether size, money, and public renown could ever substitute for taste, integrity, and the courage to do difficult, unglamorous work. The aphorism distills that critique. It resists the lazy scoreboard that counts only what is easy to count.
There is a social angle embedded in the floral imagery. Violets have long symbolized modesty; their virtues are quiet. Ferber’s fiction dignifies people whose labor feeds and clothes others, whose art refines perception, whose decency keeps communities intact. Such contributions rarely dominate the horizon like sunflowers, yet they shape the texture of daily life. She suggests a recalibration of attention: notice what is small, patient, and carefully made; it may be better, not in volume, but in value.
The line is also a warning about visibility. Large things cast shadows and drown out subtler notes. In an age addicted to metrics — followers, square footage, market cap, megapixels — the temptation to mistake scale for excellence is stronger than ever. Ferber offers a different standard. Let the measure be depth, not height; quality, not quantity. Sunflowers and violets are both flowers. One does not invalidate the other. The world needs the quiet as much as the grand.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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