Quotes from Ford Madox Ford

It was astonishing that Mark, who was a millionaire at least, and probably a good deal more, should live in such a dingy apartment – it had for its chief decoration the hoofs of several deceased race-winners, mounted as inkstands, as pen-racks, as paper-weights – and afford himself only such a lugubrious breakfast of fat slabs of ham over which bled pallid eggs.…

By Jove...' he said to himself: 'It's true! What a jolly little mistress she'd make!

AT the slight creaking made by Macmaster in pushing open his door, Tietjens started violently. He was sitting in a smoking-jacket, playing patience engrossedly in a sort of garret bedroom. It had a sloping roof outlined by black oak beams, which cut into squares the cream-coloured patent distemper of the walls.

Then, happy was the man who carried his liquor well.

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

A great deal of the calmness of her insolence had left her. She had expected to have the whole night in which luxuriously to torment the lump opposite her. To torment him and to allure him.

My dear, it couldn't have lasted for ever … But you're a good man. And very clever… . You will get through….

What distinguished man from the brutes was his freedom. When

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

But, even with all her differences, Mrs. Basil did not appear to Lenora to differ so very much from herself. She was truthful, honest and, for the rest, just a woman. And Lenora had a vague sort of idea that, to a man, all women are the same after three weeks of close intercourse.

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

And Paris, when you avoid the more conspicuous resorts, and when you are unprovided with congenial companionship can prove nearly as overwhelming as is, say, Birmingham on a Sunday.

I thought suddenly that she wasn't real; she was just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings out of fashion-plates.

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.

It wasn't as if we were waiting for a train, it wasn't as if we were waiting for a meal - it was just that there were was nothing to wait for. Nothing.

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 to madness.

there are times when to a poor priest the rule of the Church as regards marriage seems bitter hard

Being correspondent of a Left paper with a name like Eisenstein deprived one of one's chance of usefulness. Besides

Edith Ethel with the sweetest possible smile would beg the pillows off a whole hospital ward full of dying…. She

there are times when to a poor priest the rule of the Church as regards marriage seems bitter hard and he almost doubts her inscrutable wisdom.

It is queer the fantastic things that quite good people will do in order to keep up their appearance of calm pococurantism.

It was probably indecent to think of a corpse as impotent. But he was, very likely. That would be why his wife had taken up with the prize-fighter Red Evans Williams of Castell Goch.

being a miner he sat on his heels more comfortably than on a chair

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.