"Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little"
About this Quote
A warning disguised as a shrug, Ferber's line punctures the American habit of treating "more" as a moral category. The opener, "Perhaps", is doing sly work: it softens the claim just enough to slip past defensiveness, then lands the real critique. She isn't preaching restraint as a virtue in the abstract; she's questioning the cultural logic that equates abundance with success and intensity with authenticity.
The balance in the sentence is the point. "Too much" and "too little" are framed as twin failures, a neat rhetorical seesaw that makes excess feel newly suspicious. Ferber takes a cliché we expect to be one-directional ("too little is bad") and flips it into a symmetrical indictment. That symmetry is subtextual: it suggests we don't just suffer from deprivation, we also suffer from our compensations - the overcorrections, the hoarding, the appetite that keeps escalating because it mistakes quantity for security.
As a novelist who wrote through boom-and-bust modernity - the industrial surge, the Jazz Age, the Depression, postwar consumer culture - Ferber understood excess as a storyline Americans repeatedly fall for. Her work often tracks how ambition and comfort can curdle into distortion: families fractured by acquisition, identities built around status, landscapes reshaped by extraction. Read in that light, the quote isn't about moderation as tidy self-help. It's a diagnostic sentence about a society that can't tell the difference between enough and everything, and pays for that confusion at both ends of the scale.
The balance in the sentence is the point. "Too much" and "too little" are framed as twin failures, a neat rhetorical seesaw that makes excess feel newly suspicious. Ferber takes a cliché we expect to be one-directional ("too little is bad") and flips it into a symmetrical indictment. That symmetry is subtextual: it suggests we don't just suffer from deprivation, we also suffer from our compensations - the overcorrections, the hoarding, the appetite that keeps escalating because it mistakes quantity for security.
As a novelist who wrote through boom-and-bust modernity - the industrial surge, the Jazz Age, the Depression, postwar consumer culture - Ferber understood excess as a storyline Americans repeatedly fall for. Her work often tracks how ambition and comfort can curdle into distortion: families fractured by acquisition, identities built around status, landscapes reshaped by extraction. Read in that light, the quote isn't about moderation as tidy self-help. It's a diagnostic sentence about a society that can't tell the difference between enough and everything, and pays for that confusion at both ends of the scale.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Edna
Add to List
