Top 100 Ford Madox Ford Quotes
#1. She had Authority conferred on her. Metempsychosistically.
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#2. Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.
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#3. And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.
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#4. 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.
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#5. 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.
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#7. 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.
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#9. 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.
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#10. My dear, it couldn't have lasted for ever ... But you're a good man. And very clever ... . You will get through ... .
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#11. Ruggles disliked Christopher Tietjens with the inveterate dislike of the man who revels in gossip for the man who never gossips.
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#12. 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.
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#14. If you hunch your shoulders too long against a storm your shoulders will grow bowed. ...
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#15. Words passed, but words could no more prove an established innocence than words can enhance a love that exists.
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#16. He carried that obsession with him always. And in the end, by its very wrongness, it saved his life.
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#17. 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.
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#18. As Tietjens saw the world, you didn't "talk." Perhaps you didn't even think about how you felt.
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#20. 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.
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#21. Being a miner he sat on his heels more comfortably than on a chair
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#22. 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?
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#23. He thought he suddenly understood. For the Lincon-shire sergeant-major the word Peace meant that a man could stand up on a hill. For him it meant someone to talk to.
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#24. 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
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#25. His sister-in-law Sylvia represented for him unceasing, unsleeping activities of a fantastic kind.
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#26. Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.
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#27. God is probably - and very rightly - on the side of the stuffy domesticities. Otherwise
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#28. Was this then Lent, pressing hard on the heels of Saturnalia? Not
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#29. I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.
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#30. If you live among dogs they'll think you've the motives of a dog.
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#31. 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.
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#32. 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.
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#33. It was as if a man should have jumped out of a frying pan into - a duckpond.
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#34. When, then, a man was deprived of freedom he became like a brute. To
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#35. 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.
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#36. 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.
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#37. 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?
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#38. Edith Ethel with the sweetest possible smile would beg the pillows off a whole hospital ward full of dying ... . She
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#39. 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.
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#40. It is, in fact, asking for trouble if you are more altruist than the society that surrounds you.
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#42. 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.
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#43. For love is like a journey in mountainous country, up through the clouds, and down into the shadows to an unknown destination.
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#44. He was presumably a lover. They did things like commanding battalions. And worse!
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#45. By Jove ... ' he said to himself: 'It's true! What a jolly little mistress she'd make!
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#46. What distinguished man from the brutes was his freedom. When,
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#47. 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.
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#48. 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.
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#49. Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?
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#50. 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.
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#51. For Mrs. Satterthwaite interested herself - it was the only interest she had - in handsome, thin, and horribly disreputable young men.
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#52. 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.
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#53. 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.
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#54. 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.
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#55. Nulla dies felix - call no day fortunate till it be ended.
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#56. He was grotesque, really. But joy radiated from his homespuns when you walked beside him. It welled out; it enveloped you.
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#57. That in effect was love. It struck him as astonishing. The word was so little in his vocabulary ...
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#58. They were simple, earnest people, those early Victorians, and had not yet learnt the trick of avoiding disturbing thoughts and sights.
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#60. Gentlemen don't earn money. Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don't do anything. They
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#61. So you cannot teach me a great deal about the shady in life. I was in the family of a Middlesex County Councillor. In
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#62. 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.
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#63. 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.
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#64. The gods to each ascribe a differing lot: Some enter at the portal. Some do not!
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#65. 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.
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#66. Inspector had been in the library, and might possibly have
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#67. 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.
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#69. 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.
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#70. 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
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#71. Ford's last Fifth Queen novel is amazing. The whole cycle is a noble conception.
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#72. 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.
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#74. In one's own home it is as if little, innate sympathies draw one to particular chairs that seem to enfold one in an embrace, or take one along particular streets that seem friendly when others may be hostile. And, believe me, that feeling is a very important part of life.
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#75. 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.
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#76. But decent augurs grin behind their masks. They never preach to each other.
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#77. 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.
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#78. What did you do on Armistice Night? My beloved is mine and I am his!
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#79. Sylvia knew he was only now formulating his settled opinion so as not to have his active brain to give to the discussion.
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#80. 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.
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#81. That monstrosity you honour with your name - which is also mine, thank you!
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#83. Being correspondent of a Left paper with a name like Eisenstein deprived one of one's chance of usefulness. Besides
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#84. 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
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#85. I thought suddenly that she wasn't real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings out of fashion-plates.
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#86. 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
#87. 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.
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#88. 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?
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#89. Few Germans were imaginative enough to be irresponsible, but
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#90. [W]e are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.
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#91. You are to understand that Lenora loved Edward with a passion that was yet like an agony of hatred. And she had lived with him for years and years without addressing to him one word of tenderness. I don't know how she could do it.
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#92. 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.
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#93. It was business, and business may be presumed to cover quite a lot of bad taste.
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#94. The rocks would be there a million years after the light went for the last time out.
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#96. 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.
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#97. Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.
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#98. Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.
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#99. It is of course lawful to learn of the Enemy; but is it sensible?
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#100. 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.
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