Ford Madox Ford Quotes

The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened him and hardened him. There was no other way to look at it. It had made him reach a point at which he would no longer stand unbearable things.

...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.

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.

[W]e are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.

If you hunch your shoulders too long against a storm your shoulders will grow bowed.…

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.

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.

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.

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

Men, at any rate, never fulfilled expectations. They might, upon acquaintance, turn out more entertaining than they appeared; but almost always taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with any man before you had said: “But I’ve read all this before…” You knew the opening, you were already bored by the middle, and, especially, you knew the end….

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.

Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?

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

Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.

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.