Ford Madox Ford quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Ford Madox Ford

Top Ford Madox Ford Quotes

Browse top 55 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Ford Madox Ford.

Favorite Ford Madox Ford Quotes

1. "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

2. "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

3. "So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars." ~ Ford Madox Ford

4. "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

5. "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

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

7. "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

8. "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

9. "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

10. "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

11. "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

12. "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

13. "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

14. "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

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

16. "If you hunch your shoulders too long against a storm your shoulders will grow bowed.…" ~ Ford Madox Ford

17. "What did you do on Armistice Night? My beloved is mine and I am his!" ~ Ford Madox Ford

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

19. "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

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

21. "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

22. "He was presumably a lover. They did things like commanding battalions. And worse!" ~ Ford Madox Ford

23. "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

24. "They were simple, earnest people, those early Victorians, and had not yet learnt the trick of avoiding disturbing thoughts and sights." ~ Ford Madox Ford

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

26. "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

27. "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

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

29. "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

30. "So she had looked in on Mark, reading his correspondence with his copy of The Times airing on a chair-back before the fire - for he was just the man to retain the eighteen-forty idea that you can catch cold by reading a damp newspaper." ~ Ford Madox Ford

31. "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

32. "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

33. "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

34. "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

35. "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

36. "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

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

38. "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

39. "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

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

41. "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

42. "But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man, is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, 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

43. "...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

44. "But responsibility hardens the heart. It must." ~ Ford Madox Ford

45. "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

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

47. "The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one's kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one's fellow beings. But one doesn't" ~ Ford Madox Ford

48. "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

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

50. "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

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