Ford Madox Ford Quotes

And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.

The beastly Huns! They stood between him and Valentine Wannop. If they would go home he could be sitting talking to her for whole afternoons. That was what a young woman was for. 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.

Well, then, he ought to write her a letter. He ought to say: 'This is to tell you that I propose to live with you as soon as this show is over. You will be prepared immediately on cessation of active hostilities to put yourself at my disposal; please. Signed, Xtopher Tietjens, Acting O.C. 9th Glams. A proper military communication.

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.

She asked him perpetually what he wanted. What did he want? What did he want? And all he ever answered was: "I have told you". He meant that he wanted the girl to go to her father in India as soon as her father should cable that he was ready to receive her. But just once he tripped up. To Leonora's eternal question he answered that all he desired in life was that — that he could pick himself together again and go on with his daily occupations if — the girl, being five thousand miles away, would continue to love him. He wanted nothing more, He prayed his God for nothing more. Well, he was a sentimentalist.

At the beginning of the war…I had to look in on the War Office, and in a room I found a fellow…What do you think he was doing…what the hell do you think he was doing? He was devising the ceremonial for the disbanding of a Kitchener battalion. You can’t say we were not prepared in one matter at least…. Well, the end of the show was to be: the adjutant would stand the battalion at ease; the band would play Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant would say: There will be no more parades…. Don’t you see how symbolical it was — the band playing Land of Hope and Glory, and then the adjutant saying: There will be no more parades?…For there won’t. There won’t, there damn well won’t. No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country…nor for the world, I dare say… None… Gone… Napoo finny! No…more…parades!

Edith Ethel with the sweetest possible smile would beg the pillows off a whole hospital ward full of dying….

Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.

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

I thought suddenly that she wasn't real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings out of fashion-plates.

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.

there are times when to a poor priest the rule of the Church as regards marriage seems bitter hard and he almost doubts her inscrutable wisdom.

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.…

I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.

(You cannot control your imagination’s pictures.