Ford Madox Ford Quotes

For love is like a journey in mountainous country, up through the clouds, and down into the shadows to an unknown destination.

He carried that obsession with him always. And in the end, by its very wrongness, it saved his life.

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.

If you live among dogs they'll think you've the motives of a dog. What other motives can they give you ?

Words passed, but words could no more prove an established innocence than words can enhance a love that exists.

These trenches are like Pompeii, sir.

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.

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

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.

Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man — the man with the right to existence — a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbor’s womankind? I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or all we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness.

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!

They were simple, earnest people, those early Victorians, and had not yet learnt the trick of avoiding disturbing thoughts and sights.

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.

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

(You cannot control your imagination’s pictures.