Ford Madox Ford Quotes

No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to Heidelberg, not to Hamelin, not to Verona, not to Mont Majour - not so much as to Carcassonne itself. We talked of it, of course, but I guess Florence got all she wanted out of one look at a place. She had the seeing eye. I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I want to return - towns with the blinding white sun upon them; stone pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crow-stepped gables with the little saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples. ~ Ford Madox Ford

For Mrs. Satterthwaite interested herself - it was the only interest she had - in handsome, thin, and horribly disreputable young men. ~ Ford Madox Ford

He carried that obsession with him always. And in the end, by its very wrongness, it saved his life. ~ Ford Madox Ford

What distinguished man from the brutes was his freedom. When, ~ Ford Madox Ford

...a flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at the zoo inviting buns--especially when the ladies were present. [on fellow Brit Ford Madox Ford] ~ Percy Wyndham Lewis

He was grotesque, really. But joy radiated from his homespuns when you walked beside him. It welled out; it enveloped you. ~ Ford Madox Ford

You may ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnesses for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads. ~ Ford Madox Ford

The man looked down at his feet. Tietjens said to himself that it was Valentine Wannop doing this to him. He ought to turn the man down at once. He was pervaded by a sense of her being. It was imbecile. Yet it was so. ~ Ford Madox Ford

I suppose that my inner soul - my dual personality - had realized long before that Florence was a personality of paper - that she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold. ~ Ford Madox Ford

I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive. No man can, or, if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Nulla dies felix - call no day fortunate till it be ended. ~ Ford Madox Ford

With each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory. A turn of the eyebrow, a tone of the voice, a queer characteristic gesture - all these things, and it is these things that cause to arise the passion of love. ~ Ford Madox Ford

The world is full of places to which I want to return ~ Ford Madox Ford

Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing. ~ Ford Madox Ford

When, then, a man was deprived of freedom he became like a brute. To ~ Ford Madox Ford

If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple? ~ Ford Madox Ford

You will then. Listen here ... I've always got this to look forward to: I'll settle down by that man's side. I'll be as virtuous as any woman. I've made up my mind to it and I'll be it. And I'll be bored stiff for the rest of my life. Except for one thing. I can torment that man. And I'll do it. Do you understand how I'll do it? There are many ways. But if the worst comes to the worst I can always drive him silly ... by corrupting the child!' She was panting a little, and round her brown eyes the whites showed. 'I'll get even with him. I can. I know how, you see. And with you, through him, for tormenting me. I've come all the way from Brittany without stopping. I haven't slept ... But I can ... ~ Ford Madox Ford

Gentlemen don't earn money. Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don't do anything. They ~ Ford Madox Ford

My favourite book - 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, which I have read about 20 times - is different from my favourite author, who is Iris Murdoch. I find her books exciting and unputdownable. Her characters are so carefully studied and in-depth; I love that. ~ Ruth Rendell

Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden. ~ Ford Madox Ford

And Paris, when you avoid the more conspicuous resorts, and when you are unprovided with congenial companionship can prove nearly as overwhelming as is, say, Birmingham on a Sunday. ~ Ford Madox Ford

He was in a beastly hole. But decency demanded that he shouldn't act in panic. He had a mechanical, normal panic that made him divest himself of money. Gentlemen don't earn money. Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don't do anything. They exist. Perfuming the air like Madonna lilies. Money comes into them as air through petals and foliage. Thus the world is made better and brighter. And, of course, thus political life can be kept clean! ... So you can't make money. ~ Ford Madox Ford

A great night, with room enough for Heaven to be hidden there from our not too perspicacious eyes. ... It was said that an earthquake shock imperceptible to our senses set those cattle and sheep and horses and pigs crashing through all the hedges of the county. And it was queer: before they had so started lowing and moving Mark was now ready to swear that he had heard a rushing sound. He probably had not! One could so easily self-deceive oneself! The cattle had been panicked because they had been sensible of the presence of the Almighty walking upon the firmament. ... ~ Ford Madox Ford

Being correspondent of a Left paper with a name like Eisenstein deprived one of one's chance of usefulness. Besides ~ Ford Madox Ford

You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become. Just as the blacksmith says: 'By hammer and hand all Art doth stand,' just as the baker thinks that all the solar system revolves around his morning delivery of rolls, as the postmaster-general believes that he alone is the preserver of society - and surely, surely, these delusions are necessary to keep us going. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Ruggles told my father what he did because it is not a good thing to belong to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries in the twentieth. Or really, because it is not good to have taken one's public-school's ethical system seriously. I am really, sir, the English public schoolboy. That's an eighteenth-century product. What with ~ Ford Madox Ford

Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Few Germans were imaginative enough to be irresponsible, but ~ Ford Madox Ford

A great deal of the calmness of her insolence had left her. She had expected to have the whole night in which luxuriously to torment the lump opposite her. To torment him and to allure him. ~ Ford Madox Ford

The repressions of the passionate drive them mad. ~ Ford Madox Ford

It's the quality of harmony, sir. The quality of being in harmony with you own soul. God having given you your own soul you are then in harmony with Heaven. ~ Ford Madox Ford

This was a war of attrition...A mug's game! A mug's game as far as killing men was concerned, but not an uninteresting occupation if you considered it as a struggle of various minds spread all over the broad landscape in the sunlight. They did not kill many men and they expended an infinite number of missiles and a vast amount of thought. If you took six million men armed with loaded canes and stockings containing bricks or knives and set them against another six million men similarly armed, at the end of three hours four million on the one side and the entire six million on the other would be dead. So, as far as killing went, it really was a mug's game. That was what happened if you let yourself get into the hands of the applied scientist. For all these things were the products not of the soldier but of hirsute bespectacled creatures who peer through magnifying glasses. Or of course, on our side, they would be shaven-cheeked and less abstracted. They were efficient as slaughterers in that they enabled the millions of men to be moved. When you had only knives you could not move very fast. On the other hand, your knife killed at every stroke: you would set a million men firing at each other with rifles from eighteen hundred yards. But few rifles ever registered a hit. So the invention was relatively inefficient. And it dragged things out!
And suddenly it had become boring. ~ Ford Madox Ford

I am not going to be so American as to say that all true love demands some sacrifice. It doesn't. But I think that love will be truer and more permanent in which self-sacrifice has been exacted. ~ Ford Madox Ford

She at least was broad-minded, and moreover she understood the workings of the human heart. It was creditable for a man to ruin himself for the object of his affections. But this at least she found exaggerated. ~ Ford Madox Ford

But of course he hates you for being in the army. All the men who aren't hate all the men that are. ~ Ford Madox Ford

I call this the Saddest Story, rather than 'The Ashburnham Tragedy,' just because it is so sad, just because there was no current to draw things along to a swift and inevitable end. There is about it none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is no about it no nemesis, no destiny. Here were two noble people - for I am convinced that both Edward and Lenora had noble natures - here, then, were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heartaches, agony of the mind and death. And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is all darkness. ~ Ford Madox Ford

he invited Sylvia to dine with him somewhere where they were going to have something fabulous and very nasty at about two guineas the ounce on the menu. Something like that! And during dinner Sir John had entertained her by singing the praises of her husband. He said that Tietjens was much too great a gentleman to be wasted on the old-furniture trade: that was why he hadn't persisted. But he sent by Sylvia a message to the effect that if ever Tietjens did come to be in want of money . . . Occasionally Sylvia was worried ~ Ford Madox Ford

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst. ~ Ford Madox Ford

I want to be like Ford Madox Ford. I want to be talking to somebody across a fire, and I want him to join me and listen to me, and if he is fidgeting in his chair, I know I am not doing my job. I am a storyteller, and I know most people like a story. ~ John Le Carre

For love is like a journey in mountainous country, up through the clouds, and down into the shadows to an unknown destination. ~ Ford Madox Ford

IT has been remarked that the peculiarly English habit of self-suppression in matters of the emotions puts the Englishman at a great disadvantage in moments of unusual stresses. ~ Ford Madox Ford

It was as if a man should have jumped out of a frying pan into - a duckpond. ~ Ford Madox Ford

The beastly Huns! They stood between him and Valentine Wannop. If they would go home he could be sitting talking to her for whole afternoons. That was what a young woman was for. You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her. You could not do that without living with her. You could not live with her without seducing her; but that was the by-product. The point is that you can't otherwise talk. ~ Ford Madox Ford

You have to wait together - for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained ... and exhausted. So that ... That in effect was love. ~ Ford Madox Ford

[W]e are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Damn it all, it's the first duty of a soldier - it's the first duty of all Englishmen - to be able to tell a good lie in answer to a charge. ~ Ford Madox Ford

If you're going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he'd better be real enough that you can smell his breath. ~ Ford Madox Ford

It was detestable to him to be in control of another human being – as detestable as it would have been to be himself a prisoner. ~ Ford Madox Ford

What the artist wishes to do - as far as you are concerned - is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself. ~ Ford Madox Ford

And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me. ~ Ford Madox Ford

It is a queer world and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want? ~ Ford Madox Ford

This October like November,
That August like a hundred thousand hours,
And that September,
A hundred thousand dragging sunlit days,
And half October like a thousand years ... ~ Ford Madox Ford

Mind, I am not preaching anything contrary to accepted morality. I am not advocating free love in this or any other case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful are condemned to suicide and madness. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Inspector had been in the library, and might possibly have ~ Ford Madox Ford

That in effect was love. It struck him as astonishing. The word was so little in his vocabulary ... ~ Ford Madox Ford

The exact eye: exact observation: it was a man's work. The only
work for a man. Why then were artists soft: effeminate: not men at all:
whilst the army officer, who had the inexact mind of the schoolteacher,
was a manly man? Quite a manly man: until he became an old woman! ~ Ford Madox Ford

Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? ~ Ford Madox Ford

I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Words passed, but words could no more prove an established innocence than words can enhance a love that exists. ~ Ford Madox Ford

It was business, and business may be presumed to cover quite a lot of bad taste. ~ Ford Madox Ford

If you only would!" He added rather diffidently: "If you would not mind remembering that I am a military court of inquiry. It makes it easier for me to report to the general if you say things dully and in the order that they happened. ~ Ford Madox Ford

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious. ~ Ford Madox Ford

But upon my word, I don't know how we put in our time. How does one put in one's time? How is it possible to have achieved nine years and to have nothing whatever to show for it? ~ Ford Madox Ford

The handful of Germans who had reached the trench had been sacrificed for the stupid sort of fun called. Strategy, probably. Stupid! ... It was, of course, just like German spools to go mining by candle-light. Obsoletely Nibenlungen-like. Dwarfs probably! ~ Ford Madox Ford

In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant factor - a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to some weak spot in one's character or in one's career. For it is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one's small meannesses. It is really death to do so - that is why so many marriages turn out unhappily. ~ Ford Madox Ford

She said that she did not wish for any monuments to the Hurlbird family. At the time I thought that that was because of a New England dislike for necrological ostentation. ~ Ford Madox Ford

His sister-in-law Sylvia represented for him unceasing, unsleeping activities of a fantastic kind. ~ Ford Madox Ford

We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story. ~ Ford Madox Ford

No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity if, taking down one of his ten-year-old books, he exclaims: "Great heavens, did I write as well as that then?" for the implication always is that one does not write any longer so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano. ~ Ford Madox Ford

All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities
even merely with the velvet. ~ Ford Madox Ford

If he had uttered the word "come" she would have followed him to the bitter ends of the earth; if he had said, "There is no hope," she would have known the finality of despair. ~ Ford Madox Ford

She had always known under her mind and now she confessed it: her agony had been, half of it, because one day he would say farewell to her, like that, with the inflexion of a verb. As, just occasionally, using the word 'we' - and perhaps without intention - he had let her know that he loved her. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Now a man listening to gossip about another man whom he knows very well will go pretty far in the way of believing what a beautiful woman will tell him about that other man. Beauty and truth have a way of appearing to be akin; and it is true that no man knows what another man is doing when he is out of sight. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Every word that he had spoken amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings had been a link in a love-speech. It was not merely that he had confessed to her as he would have to no other soul in the world - 'To no other soul in the world,' he had said! - his doubts, his misgivings, and his fears; it was that every word he uttered and that came to her, during the lasting of that magic, had sung of passion. If he had uttered the word 'Come', she would have followed him to the bitter ends of the earth; if he had said, 'There is no hope', she would have known the finality of despair. Having said neither, she knew: 'This is our condition; so we must continue!' And she knew, too, that he was telling her that he, like her, was ... oh, say, on the side of the angels. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Leonora, as I have said, was the perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in normal circumstances her desires were those of the woman who is needed by society. She desired children, decorum, an establishment she desired to avoid waste, she desired to keep up appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal even in her utterly undeniable beauty. But I don't mean to say that she acted perfectly normally in this perfectly abnormal situation. All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the piece. What would you have? Steel is a normal, hard, polished substance. But if you put it in a hot fire it will become red, soft, and not to be handled. If you put it in a fire still more hot it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Otherwise the world could not continue - the children would not be healthy. And ~ Ford Madox Ford

Fellows come in and tell the most extraordinarily gross stories - so gross that they will positively give you a pain. And yet they'd be offended if you suggested that they weren't the sort of person you could trust your wife alone with. ~ Ford Madox Ford

From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out at the great moon and say: 'Why, it is nearly as bright as in Provence!' And then we shall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay. ~ Ford Madox Ford

This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous; he of good birth; she of birth quite as good; each filled with a too good breakfast that each could yet capably digest. Each come just from an admirably appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people, their promenade sanctioned, as it were, by Church - two clergy - the State, two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids. ~ Ford Madox Ford

She warned him that, if he got killed, she should cut down the great cedar at the south-west corner of Groby. It kept all the light out of the principal drawing-room and the bedrooms above it ... He winced: he certainly winced at that. She regretted that she had said it. It was along other lines that she desired to make him wince. ~ Ford Madox Ford

But decent augurs grin behind their masks. They never preach to each other. ~ Ford Madox Ford

The room where they were dancing was very dark.... It was queer to be in his arms.... She had known better dancers.... He had looked ill.... Perhaps he was.... Oh, poor Valentine-Elisabeth.... What a funny position!.... The good gramophone played.... Destiny!.... You see, father! ... In his arms! Of course, dancing is not really.... But so near the real thing! So near!... 'Good luck to the special intention!...' She had almost kissed him on the lips ... All but!... Effleurer, the French call it.... But she was not as humble.... He had pressed her tighter.... All these months without.... My lord did me honour.... Good for Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre.... He knew she had almost kissed him on the lips.... And that his lips had almost responded.... The civilian, the novelist, had turned out the last light.... Tietjens said, 'Hadn't we better talk?...' She said: 'In my room, then! I'm dog-tired.... I haven't slept for six nights.... In spite of drugs...' He said: 'Yes. Of course! Where else?.... ~ Ford Madox Ford

At the same time, Mrs de Bray Pape was saying things to the discredit of Marie Antoinette, whom apparently she disliked. He could not imagine why anyone should dislike Marie Antoinette. Yet very likely she was dislikeable. The French, who were sensible people, had cut her head off, so they presumably disliked her . . ~ Ford Madox Ford

You see in such a world as this, an idealist -or perhaps it's only a sentimentalist-must be stoned to death. He makes the others so uncomfortable. He haunts them at their golf. ~ Ford Madox Ford

These trenches are like Pompeii, sir. ~ Ford Madox Ford

But charity begins surely with the char! ~ Ford Madox Ford

You and I are like two people . . .' He paused and began again more quickly: 'Do you know these soap advertisement signs that read differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read "Monkey's Soap"; if you look back when you've passed it's "Needs no Rinsing." . . . You and I are standing at different angles and though we both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we stood side by side we should see yet third. . . . But I hope we respect each other. ~ Ford Madox Ford

The rocks would be there a million years after the light went for the last time out. ~ Ford Madox Ford

It was probably indecent to think of a corpse as impotent. But he was, very likely. That would be why his wife had taken up with the prize-fighter Red Evans Williams of Castell Goch. ~ Ford Madox Ford

There is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. ~ Ford Madox Ford

The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened him and hardened him. There was no other way to look at it. It had made him reach a point at which he would no longer stand unbearable things. ~ Ford Madox Ford

So you cannot teach me a great deal about the shady in life. I was in the family of a Middlesex County Councillor. In ~ Ford Madox Ford

Oh, child,' the Father exclaimed, 'whether it's St Martha or that Mary that made the bitter choice, not one of them ever looked more virtuous than you. Why aren't ye born to be a good man's help-meet? ~ Ford Madox Ford

I don't know what anyone has to be proud of. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Being a miner he sat on his heels more comfortably than on a chair ~ Ford Madox Ford

I thought suddenly that she wasn't real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings out of fashion-plates. ~ Ford Madox Ford

She asked herself the eternal question – and she knew it to be the eternal question – whether no man and woman can ever leave it at the beautiful inclination. ~ Ford Madox Ford

A gentleman in those days consulted his heirs about tree planting. Should you plant a group of copper beeches against a group of white maples over against the ha-ha a quarter of a mile from the house so that the contrast seen from the ball-room windows should be agreeable - in thirty years' time? In those days thought, in families, went in periods of thirty years, owner gravely consulting heir who should see that development of light and shade that the owner never would. ~ Ford Madox Ford