Ford Madox Ford Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The first thing you have to consider when writing a novel is your story, and then your story - and then your story!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The world is full of places to which I want to return

It's the quality of harmony, sir. The quality of being in harmony with you own soul. God having given you your own soul you are then in harmony with Heaven.

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

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

Ford's last Fifth Queen novel is amazing. The whole cycle is a noble conception.

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.

I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive. No man can, or, if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

But responsibility hardens the heart. It must.

He was presumably a lover. They did things like commanding battalions. And worse!

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

But to betray her with battalion... That is against decency, against Nature...And for him, Christopher tietjens, to come down to the level of the men you met here!

But always, at moments when his mind was like a blind octopus, squirming in an agony of knife-cuts, she would drop in that accusation.