Ford Madox Ford Quotes

You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her. You could not do that without living with her. You could not live with her without seducing her; but that was the by-product. The point is that you can't otherwise talk. You can't finish talks at street corners; in museums; even in drawing-rooms. You mayn't be in the mood when she is in the mood – for the intimate conversation that means the final communion of your souls. 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.

You may well 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 set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

If you live among dogs they’ll think you’ve the motives of a dog.

Only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst.

She said: ‘Would you take this bit of parchment.… I got a little Jew girl to write on it in Hebrew: It’s “God bless you and keep you: God watch over you at your goings out and at …” ’ He tucked it into his breast pocket. ‘The talismanic passage,’ he said. ‘Of course I’ll wear it.…

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.

The Central Empires represented Roman Catholicism, the Allies Protestantism and Orthodoxy. Let them unite.

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

There, there, my dear boy,’ he said, ‘come and have a sloe gin. That’s the real answer to all beastly problems.

And she knew too: 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.

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

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.

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.

He had a great deal to think of if he was to get the hang of – he was certainly not going to interfere with – the world and having to listen to conversations that were mostly moral apophthegms had tired him. He got too many at too short intervals.

He had the very greatest admiration. He admire her for her truthfulness, for her cleanness of mind, and the clean-run-ness of her limbs, for her efficiency, for the fairness of her skin, for the gold of her hair, for her religion, for her sense of duty. It was a satisfaction to take her about with him.