Quotes from Ford Madox Ford

So you cannot teach me a great deal about the shady in life. I was in the family of a Middlesex County Councillor. In

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 decent augurs grin behind their masks. They never preach to each other.

But of course he hates you for being in the army. All the men who aren't hate all the men that are.

She said: 'Would you take this bit of parchment.… I got a little Jew girl to write on it in Hebrew: It's "God bless you and keep you: God watch over you at your goings out and at Ã¢â'¬Â¦Ã¢â'¬Â Ã¢â'¬â"¢ He tucked it into his breast pocket. 'The talismanic passage,' he said. 'Of course I'll wear it.…

Our Minister for Water-closets won't keep two and a half million men in any base in order to get the votes of their women

A world with England presenting the spectacles of moral cowardice will be a world on a lower plane…. If

A world profits by the example of a steadfast nation….

There won't be any more parades after this war. There aren't any now.

The Central Empires represented Roman Catholicism, the Allies Protestantism and Orthodoxy. Let them unite.

You and I are like two people . . .' He paused and began again more quickly: 'Do you know these soap advertisement signs that read differently from several angles? As you come up to them you read Monkey's Soap; if you look back when you've passed it's Needs no Rinsing. . . . You and I are standing at different angles and though we both look at the same thing we read different messages. Perhaps if we stood side by side we should see yet third. . . . But I hope we respect each other.

It was business, and business may be presumed to cover quite a lot of bad taste.

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?

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.

That in effect was love. It struck him as astonishing. The word was so little in his vocabulary...

So she had looked in on Mark, reading his correspondence with his copy of The Times airing on a chair-back before the fire - for he was just the man to retain the eighteen-forty idea that you can catch cold by reading a damp newspaper.

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

The exact eye: exact observation: it was a man's work. The only work for a man. Why then were artists soft: effeminate: not men at all: whilst the army officer, who had the inexact mind of the schoolteacher, was a manly man? Quite a manly man: until he became an old woman!

It is of course lawful to learn of the Enemy; but is it sensible?

If you only would! He added rather diffidently: If you would not mind remembering that I am a military court of inquiry. It makes it easier for me to report to the general if you say things dully and in the order that they happened.

The repressions of the passionate drive them mad.

It was as if a man should have jumped out of a frying pan into — a duckpond.

God is probably — and very rightly — on the side of the stuffy domesticities. Otherwise

Otherwise the world could not continue — the children would not be healthy. And