Ford Madox Ford Quotes & Sayings

The signal for the train's departure was a very bright red; that is about as passionate a statement as I can get into that scene. — Ford Madox Ford

My dear, it couldn't have lasted for ever ... But you're a good man. And very clever ... . You will get through ... . — 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

Sylvia knew he was only now formulating his settled opinion so as not to have his active brain to give to the discussion. — 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

There are times when to a poor priest the rule of the Church as regards marriage seems bitter hard — Ford Madox Ford

At the beginning of the war ... I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow ... What do you think he was doing ... what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. You can't say we were not prepared in one matter at least ... . Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease; the band would play Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant would say: There will be no more parades ... . Don't you see how symbolical it was - the band playing Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant saying: There will be no more parades? ... For there won't. There won't, there damn well won't. No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country ... nor for the world, I dare say ... None ... Gone ... Napoo finny! No ... more ... parades! — Ford Madox Ford

By Jove ... ' he said to himself: 'It's true! What a jolly little mistress she'd make! — 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

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

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

He thought about her deliberately. Hard. Nothing happened. He thought of her fair, undistinguished, fresh face that made your heart miss a beat when you thought about it. His heart missed a beat. Obedient heart! Like the first primrose. Not any primrose. The first primrose. — Ford Madox Ford

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

It is very extraordinary to see the perfect flush of health on her cheeks, to see the lustre of her coiled black hair, the poise of the head upon the neck, the grace of the white hands - and to think that it all means nothing - that it is a picture without a meaning. Yes, it is queer. — Ford Madox Ford

She was certainly now obsessing him! Beyond bearing or belief. His whole being was overwhelmed by her... by her mentality, really. For of course the physical resemblance of the lance-corporal was mere subterfuge. Lance-corporals do not resemble young ladies. — Ford Madox Ford

She had Authority conferred on her. Metempsychosistically. — 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

Our Minister for Water-closets won't keep two and a half million men in any base in order to get the votes of their women — 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

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

AT the slight creaking made by Macmaster in pushing open his door, Tietjens started violently. He was sitting in a smoking-jacket, playing patience engrossedly in a sort of garret bedroom. It had a sloping roof outlined by black oak beams, which cut into squares the cream-coloured patent distemper of the walls. — Ford Madox Ford

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

But charity begins surely with the char! — 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

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 man's face, wrinkled, dark and apelike, looked up. 'He was a good pal, pore old b - ,' he said. 'You would not like, surely to goodness, to go to mess with your shoes all bloody.' 'If I had given him leave,' Tietjens said, 'he would not be dead now.' 'No, surely not,' One Seven Thomas answered. 'But it is all one. Evans of Castell Goch would surely to goodness have killed him.' 'So you knew, too, about his wife!' Tietjens said. 'We thocht it wass that,' One Seven Thomas answered, 'or you would have given him leave, cahptn. You are a good cahptn. — Ford Madox Ford

They were simple, earnest people, those early Victorians, and had not yet learnt the trick of avoiding disturbing thoughts and sights. — 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

I know!' Father Consett said. 'You're a beautiful woman. Some men would say it was a lucky fellow that lived with you. I don't ignore the fact in my cogitation. He'd imagine all sorts of delights to lurk in the shadow of your beautiful hair. And they wouldn't.' Sylvia brought her gaze down from the ceiling and fixed her brown eyes for a moment on the priest, speculatively. — 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

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

Nulla dies felix - call no day fortunate till it be ended. — 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

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

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

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

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

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story! — Ford Madox Ford

You can't kill a minuet de la coeur. You may shut up the music book ... but surely the minuet
the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be stepping itself still. — Ford Madox Ford

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

Well she was bright; and she danced ... And my function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence. And it was almost as difficult as trying to catch with your hand that dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years. — Ford Madox Ford

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

Well, then, he ought to write her a letter. He ought to say: 'This is to tell you that I propose to live with you as soon as this show is over. You will be prepared immediately on cessation of active hostilities to put yourself at my disposal; please. Signed, Xtopher Tietjens, Acting O.C. 9th Glams. A proper military communication. — 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

He wouldn't write a letter because he couldn't without beginning it 'Dear Sylvia' and ending it 'Yours sincerely' or 'truly' or 'affectionately.' He's that sort of precise imbecile. I tell you he's so formal he can't do without all the conventions there are and so truthful he can't use half of them. — Ford Madox Ford

It is not merely that people must die and people must suffer, if not here, then there. But what is dreadful is that the world goes on and people go on being stupidly cruel - in the old ways and all the time. — Ford Madox Ford

That's all right! That's all right!' But for a minute or two it wasn't really. 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. He added: 'Your mother works you very hard. — Ford Madox Ford

But responsibility hardens the heart. It must. — 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

He was a successful general because he knew men. He knew that all men will go to hell over three things: alcohol, money ... and sex. This fellow apparently hadn't. Better for him if he had! — Ford Madox Ford

What did we want with an Empire! It — 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

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

Edith Ethel with the sweetest possible smile would beg the pillows off a whole hospital ward full of dying ... . She — Ford Madox Ford

God is probably - and very rightly - on the side of the stuffy domesticities. Otherwise — 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

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

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

she had always considered that, far from the world of Ealing and its county councillors who over-ate and neighed like stallions, there were bright colonies of beings, chaste, beautiful in thought, altruist and circumspect. And, till that moment, she had imagined — Ford Madox Ford

Ford's last Fifth Queen novel is amazing. The whole cycle is a noble conception. — Ford Madox Ford

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

The gods to each ascribe a differing lot: Some enter at the portal. Some do not! — Ford Madox Ford

It is, in fact, asking for trouble if you are more altruist than the society that surrounds you. — Ford Madox Ford

It wasn't as if we were waiting for a train, it wasn't as if we were waiting for a meal - it was just that there were was nothing to wait for. Nothing. — 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

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

Edward ought, I suppose, to have gone to the Transvaal. It would have done him a great deal of good to get killed. — Ford Madox Ford

No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison - a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald. — 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

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

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

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

(You cannot control your imagination's pictures. Of — 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

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

Then, happy was the man who carried his liquor well. — Ford Madox Ford

Father Consett sighed.
'I told you this was an evil place,' he said. 'In the deep forests. She'd not have such evil thoughts in another place.' Mrs Satterthwaite said:
'I'd rather you didn't say that, Father. Sylvia would have evil thoughts in any place.'
'Sometimes,' the priest said, 'at night I think I hear the claws of evil things scratching on the shutters. This was the last place in Europe to be Christianised. Perhaps it wasn't ever even Christianised and they're here yet.'
Mrs Satterthwaite said:
'It's all very well to talk like that in the day-time. It makes the place seem romantic. But it must be near one at night. And things are bad enough as it is.'
'They are,' Father Consett said. 'The devil's at work. — Ford Madox Ford

But, in these later days, much greater convulsions had overwhelmed her. It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you are drawn towards it. Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid itself. The moon so draws the tides. — 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

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

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

The world is full of places to which I want to return — 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

Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows. — Ford Madox Ford

The novel is a medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case. — Ford Madox Ford

But, even with all her differences, Mrs. Basil did not appear to Lenora to differ so very much from herself. She was truthful, honest and, for the rest, just a woman. And Lenora had a vague sort of idea that, to a man, all women are the same after three weeks of close intercourse. — 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

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

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

It was an odd friendship, but the oddnesses of friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture. — Ford Madox Ford

If you live among dogs they'll think you've the motives of a dog. — Ford Madox Ford

But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist. - Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it's the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly. — Ford Madox Ford

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

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

But to betray her with battalion ... That is against decency, against Nature ... And for him, Christopher tietjens, to come down to the level of the men you met here! — Ford Madox Ford

The day of her long interview with Tietjens, amongst the amassed beauties of Macmaster furnishings, she marked in the calendar of her mind as her great love scene. That had been two years ago; he had been going into the army. Now he was going out again. From that she knew what a love scene was. It passed without mention of the word 'love'; it passed in impulses; warmths; rigors of the skin. Yet with every word they had said to each other they had confessed their love; in that way, when you listen to the nightingale you hear the expressed craving of your lover beating upon your heart. — 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

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

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