Ford Madox Ford > Quotes

“We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.”
― Ford Madox Ford

“Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“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.”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“The world is full of places to which I want to return”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“It was an odd friendship, but the oddnesses of friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture.”
― Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not ... & No More Parades

“Why can't people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“There is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“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.”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“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, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man, is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“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, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“But responsibility hardens the heart. It must.”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“Upon my soul!' Tietjens said to himself, 'that girl down there is the only intelligent living soul I've met for years.' A little pronounced in manner sometimes; faulty in reasoning naturally, but quite intelligent, with a touch of wrong accent now and then. But if she was wanted anywhere, there she'd be! Of good stock, of course: on both sides! But positively, she and Sylvia were the only two human beings he had met for years whom he could respect: the one for sheer efficiency in killing; the other for having the constructive desire and knowing how to set about it. Kill or cure! The two functions of man. If you wanted something killed you'd go to Sylvia Tietjens in sure faith that she would kill it: emotion, hope, ideal; kill it quick and sure. If you wanted something kept alive you'd go to Valentine: she's find something to do for it. . . . The two types of mind: remorseless enemy, sure screen, dagger ... sheath!
Perhaps the future of the world then was to women? Why not? He hand't in years met a man that he hadn't to talk down to - as you talk down to a child, as he had talked down to General Campion or to Mr. Waterhouse ... as he always talked down to Macmaster. All good fellows in their way ...”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“...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.”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“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.”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“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.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Marsden Case

“[W]e are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other.”
― Ford Madox Ford, Critical Essays of Ford Madox Ford

“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, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“If you hunch your shoulders too long against a storm your shoulders will grow bowed.…”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“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, Parade's End

“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, Parade's 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.”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“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.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“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….”
― Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End

“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”
― Ford Maddox Ford

“And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“With each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory. A turn of the eyebrow, a tone of the voice, a queer characteristic gesture—all these things, and it is these things that cause to arise the passion of love.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion