Top 100 Ford Madox Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called 'The Good Soldier,' which is everybody's favorite Ford Madox Ford if they have one, but I came to read 'Parade's End' when it was suggested via Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen.
Tom Stoppard
#3. I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often.
Ned Beauman
#4. I still carry the residue of the pressure I felt as a child to read and appreciate the right books. Growing up, I never allowed myself to read beach reading. I was always plowing through Ford Madox Ford's 'Good Solider' or something I wasn't equipped to understand.
Noah Baumbach
#5. 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
#6. Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?
Ford Madox Ford
#7. He added that a Frenchman in the train had given him a great sandwich that so stank of garlic that he had been inclined to throw it at the fellow's head.
Ford Madox Ford
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. For Mrs. Satterthwaite interested herself - it was the only interest she had - in handsome, thin, and horribly disreputable young men.
Ford Madox Ford
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Nulla dies felix - call no day fortunate till it be ended.
Ford Madox Ford
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. What distinguished man from the brutes was his freedom. When,
Ford Madox Ford
#21. 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
#22. By Jove ... ' he said to himself: 'It's true! What a jolly little mistress she'd make!
Ford Madox Ford
#23. He was presumably a lover. They did things like commanding battalions. And worse!
Ford Madox Ford
#24. 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
#25. 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
#27. It is, in fact, asking for trouble if you are more altruist than the society that surrounds you.
Ford Madox Ford
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. There are times when to a poor priest the rule of the Church as regards marriage seems bitter hard
Ford Madox Ford
#31. 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.
Ford Madox Ford
#33. 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
#34. Ford's last Fifth Queen novel is amazing. The whole cycle is a noble conception.
Ford Madox Ford
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Inspector had been in the library, and might possibly have
Ford Madox Ford
#42. He was grotesque, really. But joy radiated from his homespuns when you walked beside him. It welled out; it enveloped you.
Ford Madox Ford
#43. 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
#44. The gods to each ascribe a differing lot: Some enter at the portal. Some do not!
Ford Madox Ford
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Gentlemen don't earn money. Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don't do anything. They
Ford Madox Ford
#50. 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
#51. They were simple, earnest people, those early Victorians, and had not yet learnt the trick of avoiding disturbing thoughts and sights.
Ford Madox Ford
#52. That in effect was love. It struck him as astonishing. The word was so little in his vocabulary ...
Ford Madox Ford
#53. 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
#54. As Tietjens saw the world, you didn't "talk." Perhaps you didn't even think about how you felt.
Ford Madox Ford
#55. 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
#56. He carried that obsession with him always. And in the end, by its very wrongness, it saved his life.
Ford Madox Ford
#57. Words passed, but words could no more prove an established innocence than words can enhance a love that exists.
Ford Madox Ford
#58. 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
#60. If you hunch your shoulders too long against a storm your shoulders will grow bowed. ...
Ford Madox Ford
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. Ruggles disliked Christopher Tietjens with the inveterate dislike of the man who revels in gossip for the man who never gossips.
Ford Madox Ford
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. It is a queer world and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want?
Ford Madox Ford
#69. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.
Ford Madox Ford
#74. Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.
Ford Madox Ford
#75. She had Authority conferred on her. Metempsychosistically.
Ford Madox Ford
#76. 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
#77. Was this then Lent, pressing hard on the heels of Saturnalia? Not
Ford Madox Ford
#78. Edith Ethel with the sweetest possible smile would beg the pillows off a whole hospital ward full of dying ... . She
Ford Madox Ford
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. When, then, a man was deprived of freedom he became like a brute. To
Ford Madox Ford
#84. It was as if a man should have jumped out of a frying pan into - a duckpond.
Ford Madox Ford
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. If you live among dogs they'll think you've the motives of a dog.
Ford Madox Ford
#88. I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.
Ford Madox Ford
#89. 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
#90. God is probably - and very rightly - on the side of the stuffy domesticities. Otherwise
Ford Madox Ford
#91. Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.
Ford Madox Ford
#92. His sister-in-law Sylvia represented for him unceasing, unsleeping activities of a fantastic kind.
Ford Madox Ford
#93. 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
#94. 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.
Ford Madox Ford
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Being a miner he sat on his heels more comfortably than on a chair
Ford Madox Ford
#98. 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
#99. 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
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