“I know nothing - nothing in the world - of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone - horribly alone.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“The world is full of places to which I want to return”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“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, quote from The Good Soldier
“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, quote from The Good Soldier
“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, quote from The Good Soldier
“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, quote from The Good Soldier
“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, quote from The Good Soldier
“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, quote from The Good Soldier
“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, quote from The Good Soldier
“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, quote from The Good Soldier
“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, quote from The Good Soldier
“Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves?”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“You can't kill a minuet de la coeur. You may shut up the music book... but surely the minuet-- the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be stepping itself still. Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn't there any Nirvana pervaded by the vain thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“Well she was bright; and she danced...And my function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence. And it was almost as difficult as trying to catch with your hand that dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“She said that she did not wish for any monuments to the Hurlbird family. At the time I thought that that was because of a New England dislike for necrological ostentation.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man—the man with the right to existence—a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbor’s womankind? I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities?”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison - a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant factor - a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to some weak spot in one's character or in one's career. For it is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one's small meannesses. It is really death to do so - that is why so many marriages turn out unhappily.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“It is a queer world and fantastic world. Why can't people have what they want?”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“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, quote from The Good Soldier
“I am not going to be so American as to say that all true love demands some sacrifice. It doesn't. But I think that love will be truer and more permanent in which self-sacrifice has been exacted.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“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, quote from The Good Soldier
“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, quote from The Good Soldier
“Edward ought, I suppose, to have gone to the Transvaal. It would have done him a great deal of good to get killed.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“We talked of it, of course, but I guess Florence got all she wanted out of one look at a place. She had the seeing eye. I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I want to return.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“In one's own home it is as if little, innate sympathies draw one to particular chairs that seem to enfold one in an embrace, or take one along particular streets that seem friendly when others may be hostile. And, believe me, that feeling is a very important part of life.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“But upon my word, I don't know how we put in our time. How does one put in one's time? How is it possible to have achieved nine years and to have nothing whatever to show for it?”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
“The signal for the train's departure was a very bright red; that is about as passionate a statement as I can get into that scene.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
Born place: in Merton, Surrey, England
Born date December 17, 1873
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“I would have rather had a dad with change jingling in his pocket; one who would have spent the last forty minutes of the world raking leaves for his kids to jump in, so that they perished in one loud, bright instant, giggles still bubbling up from their bellies, never suspecting a thing.
Yeah, well. Tough luck, rich boy.”
― S.A. Bodeen, quote from The Compound
“Sometimes we hold the world in our hands, but in our greed for more let it fall, losing everything that we once had.”
― Felix O. Hartmann, quote from Dark Age
“If act one in life is about finding yourself, then act two is about finding everyone else.”
― David Levithan, quote from Hold Me Closer: The Tiny Cooper Story
“Lifetimes have changed in what feels like a heartbeat.”
― Sara Raasch, quote from Frost Like Night
“The only person in my head is me.
Tibe is not the same. The crown has changed him, as you feared it would.
The fire is in him, the fire that will burn all the world.
And it is in your son, in the prince who will never change his blood and will never sit a throne.
The only person in my head is me.
The only person who has not changed is you. You are still the little girl in a dusty room, forgotten, unwanted, out of place. You are the queen of everything, mother to a beautiful son, wife to a king who loves you, and still you cannot find it in yourself to smile.
Still you make nothing.
Still you are empty.
The only person in your head is you.
And she is no one of any importance.
She is nothing”
― Victoria Aveyard, quote from Cruel Crown
Les Misérables
Divergent
Romeo and Juliet
Jane Eyre
Lord of the Flies
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