Top 90 Ford Madox Ford Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.”

— Ford Madox Ford

2. “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

3. “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

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

— Ford Madox Ford

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

— Ford Madox Ford

6. “But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist. – Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly.”

— Ford Madox Ford

7. “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

8. “The gods to each ascribe a differing lot: Some enter at the portal. Some do not!”

— Ford Madox Ford

9. “I know nothing – nothing in the world – of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone – horribly alone.”

— Ford Madox Ford

10. “Isn’t there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?”

— Ford Madox Ford

11. “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

12. “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.”

— Ford Madox Ford

13. “It was an odd friendship, but the oddnesses of friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture.”

— Ford Madox Ford

14. “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

15. “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.”

— Ford Madox Ford

16. “The world is full of places to which I want to return.”

— Ford Madox Ford

17. “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.”

— Ford Madox Ford

18. “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

19. “Good God, what did they all see in him? for I swear there was all there was of him, inside and out; though they said he was a good soldier. Yet, Leonora adored him with a passion that was like an agony, and hated him with an agony that was as bitter as the sea. How could he arouse anything like a sentiment, in anybody?”

— Ford Madox Ford

20. “Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.”

— Ford Madox Ford

21. “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

22. “Mrs. Vanderdecken,’ Sylvia went on, ’says all men are repulsive and it’s woman’s disgusting task to live beside them.”

— Ford Madox Ford

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

— Ford Madox Ford

24. “The repressions of the passionate drive them mad.”

— Ford Madox Ford

25. “Pride and reserve are not the only things in life; perhaps they are not even the best things. But if they happen to be your particular virtues you will go all to pieces if you let them go.”

— Ford Madox Ford

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

— Ford Madox Ford

27. “If you’re going to have a character appear in a story long enough to sell a newspaper, he’d better be real enough that you can smell his breath.”

— Ford Madox Ford

28. “The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists – even of the fact he is reading a book.”

— Ford Madox Ford

29. “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

30. “From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out at the great moon and say: ‘Why, it is nearly as bright as in Provence!’ And then we shall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay.”

— Ford Madox Ford

31. “But decent augurs grin behind their masks. They never preach to each other.”

— Ford Madox Ford

32. “These trenches are like Pompeii, sir.”

— Ford Madox Ford

33. “He added that a Frenchman in the train had given him a great sandwich that so stank of garlic that he had been inclined to throw it at the fellow’s head.”

— Ford Madox Ford

34. “Now a man listening to gossip about another man whom he knows very well will go pretty far in the way of believing what a beautiful woman will tell him about that other man. Beauty and truth have a way of appearing to be akin; and it is true that no man knows what another man is doing when he is out of sight.”

— Ford Madox Ford

35. “By Jove... ′ he said to himself: ‘It’s true! What a jolly little mistress she’d make!”

— Ford Madox Ford

36. “But responsibility hardens the heart. It must.”

— Ford Madox Ford

37. “IT has been remarked that the peculiarly English habit of self-suppression in matters of the emotions puts the Englishman at a great disadvantage in moments of unusual stresses.”

— Ford Madox Ford

38. “You are to understand that Lenora loved Edward with a passion that was yet like an agony of hatred. And she had lived with him for years and years without addressing to him one word of tenderness. I don’t know how she could do it.”

— Ford Madox Ford

39. “It was as if a man should have jumped out of a frying pan into – a duckpond.”

— Ford Madox Ford

40. “Damn it all, it’s the first duty of a soldier – it’s the first duty of all Englishmen – to be able to tell a good lie in answer to a charge.”

— Ford Madox Ford

41. “Ford’s last Fifth Queen novel is amazing. The whole cycle is a noble conception.”

— Ford Madox Ford

42. “Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or all men’s lives like the lives of us good people – like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords – broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?”

— Ford Madox Ford

43. “New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible – because it is large enough to be incurious.”

— Ford Madox Ford

44. “What the artist wishes to do – as far as you are concerned – is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.”

— Ford Madox Ford

45. “Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.”

— Ford Madox Ford

46. “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 work “we” – and perhaps without intention – he had let her know that he loved her.”

— Ford Madox Ford

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

— Ford Madox Ford

48. “God is probably – and very rightly – on the side of the stuffy domesticities. Otherwise.”

— Ford Madox Ford

49. “The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story – and then your story!”

— Ford Madox Ford

50. “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