Madox Quotes & Sayings

In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotion stands against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, before quick reflection. — Ford Madox Ford

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old Campion had once said he believed - he positively believed, with shudders - that Christopher desired to live in the spirit of Christ. That had seemed horrible to the general, but Mark did not see that it was horrible, per se ... He doubted, however, whether Christ would have refused to manage Groby had it been his job. Christ was sort of an Englishman and Englishmen did not as rule refuse their jobs ... They had not used to; now no doubt they did. — Ford Madox Ford

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

It is of course lawful to learn of the Enemy; but is it sensible? — 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

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

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

Yes, a war is inevitable. Firstly, there's you fellows who can't be trusted. And then there's the multitude who mean to have bathrooms and white enamel. Millions of them; all over the world. Not merely here. And there aren't enough bathrooms and white enamel in the world to go round. — 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

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

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

What's devil to some is good to some others. — Elizabeth Madox Roberts

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

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

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

How was it possible that the most honourable man she knew should be so overwhelmed by foul and baseless rumours? It made you suspect that honour had, in itself, a quality of the evil eye . . . — Ford Madox Ford

But always, at moments when his mind was like a blind octopus, squirming in an agony of knife-cuts, she would drop in that accusation. — 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

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

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

If you hunch your shoulders too long against a storm your shoulders will grow bowed. ... — 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

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

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

What's the matter with you, Madox? You got a grudge against the world? — Charles Williams

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

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

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

I seemed to perceive that my problem - that what I had to do to prepare myself for getting into contact with her, was just to get back into contact with life. I had been kept for twelve years in a rarefied atmosphere; what I then had to do was a little fighting with real life, some wrestling with men of business, some travelling amongst larger cities, something harsh, something masculine. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is important to die in holy places. That was one of the secrets of the desert. So Madox walked into a church in Somerset, a place he felt had lost its holiness, and he committed what he believed was a holy act. — Michael Ondaatje

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

That monstrosity you honour with your name - which is also mine, thank you! — 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

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

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

First, there is the person one thinks he is and the appearance one thinks he has. Then there is the thing one actually is, and there is that which the others think, and here a myriad-faced being arose in her thought, but the second came back as being more difficult to know, for what eyes would see it and where would it stay? — Elizabeth Madox Roberts

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

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

What then is to be the lot of Rossetti's fame and influence? 'An amateur who failed in two arts', it is true; yet it hardly harms Rossetti or touches his standing. On the contrary, it defines both very brilliantly. The small word 'failed' is a small word and little more to artists who are forever going on until they give up over a game that must be lost. Every artist, when confronted by the immensities of art, which is life, must confess to failure. A failure is a thing very relative. — Ford Madox Ford

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

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

Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or all men's lives like the lives of us good people - like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords - broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows? — Ford Madox Ford

As Tietjens saw the world, you didn't "talk." Perhaps you didn't even think about how you felt. — Ford Madox Ford

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

Don't leave FDR-1 behind, I think to my fox.
Madox cocks his head like, Seriously, the damn iguana? — Victoria Scott

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

Madox, what is the name of that hollow at the base of a woman's neck? At the front. Here. What is it, does it have an official name? That hollow about the size of an impress of your thumb?"
Madox watches me for a moment through the noon glare.
"Pull yourself together," he mutters. — Michael Ondaatje

I don't know what anyone has to be proud of. — 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

Good God, what did they all see in him? for I swear there was all there was of him, inside and out; though they said he was a good soldier. Yet, Leonora adored him with a passion that was like an agony, and hated him with an agony that was as bitter as the sea. How could he arouse anything like a sentiment, in anybody? — Ford Madox Ford

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

Ruggles disliked Christopher Tietjens with the inveterate dislike of the man who revels in gossip for the man who never gossips. — Ford Madox Ford

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

And Sylvia Tietjens wavered into the room. — 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

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

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