Parade's End
by Ford Madox Ford
(BBC Books, 2012)
It was an old friendship, but the oddnesses of friendships are a frequent guarantee of their lasting texture.
Page 5.
That’s why society distrusts the cuckold, really. It never knows when it mayn’t be driven into something irrational and unjust.
Pages 11-12.
Disasters come to men through drink, bankruptcy, and women.
Page 14.
I stand for monogamy and chastity. And for no talking about it. Of course, if a man who’s a man wants to have a woman he has her. And again, no talking about it. He’d no doubt be in the end better, and better off, if he didn’t. Just as it would probably be better for him if he didn’t have the second glass of whisky and soda.
Page 19.
War is as inevitable as divorce.
Page 22.
It makes a difference to see the words on paper.
Page 31.
To know everything about a person is to be bored … bored … bored!
Page 34.
It seems we have to have a governing class and governing classes are subject to special temptations.
Page 39.
It’s volition that’s the essence of prayer.
Page 44. / Pages 701-702.
To know things was agreeable and gave a feeling of strength, of having in reserve something that the other fellow would not suspect.
Page 75.
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.
Page 77.
If you have views that aren’t the same as other people’s, and don’t keep them to yourself, other people will suspect you of immorality.
Page 79.
One had to take society as one found it.
Page 81.
It’s the person who does the thing he’s afraid of who’s the real hero.
Page 88.
In every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other; thus emotions stand against reason, intellect corrects passion and first impressions act a little, but very little, before quick reflection.
Page 93.
The only thing that matters is to do good work.
Page 127.
A gentleman has to answer his wife’s questions.
Page 130.
Kill or cure! The two functions of man.
Page 137.
All feminine claws … are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities.
Page 145.
A merciful man is merciful also to his beast.
Page 154.
Principles are like a skeleton map of a country - you know whether you’re going east or north.
Page 154.
A woman who has been let down by one man has the right - has the duty for the sake of her child - to let down a man. It becomes a woman against man: against one man.
Page 186.
Though no man can choose the land of his birth or his ancestry, he can, if he have industry and determination, so watch over himself as materially to modify his automatic habits.
Page 190.
If every day and all day long you chatter at high pitch and with the logic and lucidity of the Frenchman; if you shout in self-assertion, with our hat on your stomach, bowing from a stiff spine and by implication threaten all day long to shot your interlocutor, like the Prussian; if you are as lachrymally emotional as the Italian, or as drily and epigrammatically imbecile over unessentials as the American, you will have a noisy, troublesome, and thoughtless society without any of the surface calm that should distinguish the atmosphere of men when they are together. You will never have deep arm-chairs in which to sit for hours in clubs thinking of nothing at all.
Page 191.
Death, love, public dishonour and the like are rare occurrences in the life of the average man.
Page 191.
If you hunch your shoulders too logn against a storm your shoulders will grow bowed.
Page 201.
It is, in fact, asking for trouble if you are more altruist than the society that surrounds you.
Page 221.
He suspected that brilliance was synonymous with reprehensible tendencies.
Page 224.
There’s no reason why a man shouldn’t have a girl, and if he has he ought to keep her decently.
Page 229.
Perhaps the complete study of one woman gave you a map of all the rest!
Page 229.
If you live among dogs they’ll think you’ve the motives of a dog.
Page 230.
It’s a good thing to stick to one woman … . It saves trouble. And you know where you are.
Page 236.
For the first time in his life he dislocated the course of his thoughts to satisfy a longing in someone else.
Page 245.
You cannot suffer a great sexual shock and ever be the same.
Page 248.
A man with doubts is more of a man.
Page 249.
In such a world as this, an idealist - or perhaps it’s only a sentimentalist - must be stoned to death. He makes the others so uncomfortable.
Page 254.
The friendships of women are very tenacious things, surviving astonishing disillusionments.
Page 259.
It’s always a good thing to formulate the other fellow’s objections.
Page 272.
It’s a mistake to make nasty rows.
Page 273.
What the night had lacked in length it had made up in fantastic aspects.
Page 301.
You couldn’t look in the face a man you were never going to see again.
Page 308.
The repressions of the passionate drive them mad.
Page 318.
The curse of the army, as far as the organisation is concerned, was our imbecile national belief that the game is more than the player.
Page 329.
It seemed to Tietjens suddenly extraordinary how shut in on oneself one was in this life.
Page 343.
It was not English to be intellectually adroit. Nay, it was positively un-English.
Page 359.
It is preposterous ... to persist in figuring a person to yourself when you have no idea of where they are.
Page 362.
English people of good position consider that the basis of all marital unions or disunions, is the maxim: No scenes.
Page 368.
He would, literally, rather be dead than an open book.
Page 368.
You cannot force your mind to a deliberate, consecutive recollection unless you are in the mood; then it will do whether you want it to or not.
Page 371.
One might fornicate, obviously, as long as you did not fuss about it unhealthily. That was the right of the Seigneur in a world of Other Ranks.
Page 377.
A mother who made scenes before the servants! That was enough to ruin any boy’s life.
Page 378.
There are dishonours to which death is preferable.
Page 424.
Men … never fulfilled expectations. They might, upno acquaintance, turn out more entertaining than they appeared; but almost always taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it.
Page 425.
But success or failure … have nothing to do with the credit of a story. And a consideration of the virtues of humanity does not omit the other side. If we lose, they win. If success is necessary to your idea of virtue - virtus - they then provide the success instead of ourselves. But the thing is to be able to stick to the integrity of your character, whatever earthquake sets the house tumbling over your head.
Pages 489-490.
I could invent that life if I knew nothing at all about the facts.
Page 490.
One has to be prepared to lose men in hundreds at the right minute in order to avoid losing them in tens of thousands at the wrong! … Successful military operations consist not in taking or retaining positions, but in taking or retaining them with a minimum sacrifice of effectives.
Page 511.
If a man so handles his womenfolk that they get out of hand, he has only himself to blame.
Page 515.
He was exhibiting his sensuous delight in misplaced erudition.
Page 517.
A gentleman does not commit suicide when he has descendants.
Page 527.
One’s friends ought to believe that one is a gentleman. Automatically. That is what makes one and them in harmony. Probably your friends are your friends because they look at situations automatically as you look at them.
Pages 534-535.
You could not be a proper man if you had never seen the Mediterranean.
Page 546.
She had to save her man. You must go to any depths of ignominy to save your man.
Page 570.
A man’s books are very much himself.
Page 583.
Painter fellows doing battlefields never got that intimate effect.
Page 594.
If you cannot hear your thoughts how the hell are you going to tell what your thoughts are doing?
Page 602.
If God hadn’t invented woman men would have had to do so.
Page 624.
Huge engines are blind and thus accidental; a slow, regular picking off of the men beside you is evidence that human terribleness that is not blind or accidental is cold-bloodedly and unshakably turning its attention to a spot very near you. It may very shortly turn its attention on yourself.
Page 629.
The effect of panic is to make men fire high. They pull too sharply on their triggers.
Page 629.
Gentlemen don't earn money. Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don't do anything. They exist. Perfuming the air like Madonna lilies. Money comes to them as air through petals and foliage. Thus the world is made better and brighter.
Page 637.
Responsibility hardens the heart.
Page 656.
What distinguished man from the brutes was his freedom. When, then, a man was deprived of freedom he became like a brute.
Page 670.
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 lie with her without seducing her; but that was the by-product. The point is that you can’t otherwise talk. You can’t finish talks at street corners; in museums; even in drawing-rooms. You mayn’t be in the mood when she is in the mood - for the intimate conversation that means the final communion of your souls. You he to wait together - for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained … . That in effect was love.
Page 680.
There was so much noise it seemed to grow dark. It was a mental darkness. You could not think. A Dark Age! The earth moved.
Page 688-689.
It was a condemnation of a civilisation that he … possessed of enormous physical strength, should never have needed to use it before.
Page 690.
Never put the other side in a temper when you can help it.
Page 696.
The shouting had continued for so long that it had assumed the appearance of being a solid and unvarying thing, like life. So the silence appeared like Death.
Page 699.
The essence of prayer is volition, so the essence of blasphemy is volition.
Pages 701-702. / Page 44.
Women liked being … ruined.
Page 707.
Light was an agreeable thing. You could breathe more deeply when it was light.
Page 716.
She isn’t a bad wife. She’s a woman with appetites. She satisfies her appetites.
Page 717.
Novelists live on gossip.
Page 723.
Caesar’s wife must brave as brave as Caesar.
Page 725.
It’s a day to cry on.
Page 729.
It is the nature of men to treat women with treachery, lust, and meanness.
Page 745.
It was creditable for a man to ruin himself for the object of his affections.
Page 750.
It is the duty of the French citizen, by industry, frugality, and vigilance to accumulate goods; and it was above all the duty of the French citizen to carry back accumulated hoards to that distressed country, stripped bare as she was by the perfidious Allies.
Page 755.
An Englishman always does his duty his duty to his mother.
Pages 772.
The dominion of women over those of the opposite sex was a terrible thing.
Page 772.
A house overhung by trees is unsanitary.
Page 774.
It was a man`s job to pick a woman who would neither worry him nor be the cause of worries.
Page 785.
If you make mistakes you must take what you get for it You shouldn`t make mistakes.
Page 787.
The situation was unusual - as all situations are.
Page 788.
It was business, and business may be presumed to cover quite a lot of bad taste.
Page 788.
Questions of … sex-attraction, in spite of all the efforts of scientists, remained fairly mysterious. The best way to look at it … the safest way, was that sex-attraction occurred as a rule between temperamental and physical opposites because Nature desired to correct extremes.
Page 789.
You can break certain laws and remain the soul of honour.
Page 789.
Once having got a man to give a name to your bastard you ought to treat him with some loyalty: it is a biggish service he has done you.
Page 790.
A man is in the world to do his duty by his nation and his family.
Page 797.
It is obvious that a landlord owes something to the estate from which he and his fathers have drawn their income for generations and generations.
Page 797.
What a woman can do to deteriorate a fellow with a soft streak is beyond belief.
Page 799.
Christ was a sort of an Englishman and Englishmen did not as a rule refuse to do their jobs.
Page 803.
An Englishman’s duty is to secure for himself for ever, reasonable clothing, a clean shirt a day, a couple of mutton chops grilled without condiments, two floury potatoes, an apple pie with a piece of Stilton and pulled bread, a pint of Club Medoc, a clean room, in the winter a good fire in the grate, a comfortable arm-chair, a comfortable woman to see that all these were prepared for you, and to keep you warm in bed and to brush your bowler and fold your umbrella in the morning, When you had that secure for life you could do what you liked provided that what you did never endangered that security.
Page 805.
In normal times a country - every country - was true to itself.
Page 808.
Marriage, if you do not regard it as a sacrament - as no doubt it ought to be regarded - was nothing more than a token that a couple intended to stick to each other. Nowadays people - the right people - bothered precious little about anything but that. A constant change of partners was a social nuisance; you could not tell whether you could or couldn’t invite a couple together to a tea-fight. And society existed for social functions. That was why promiscuity was no good. For social functions you had to have an equal number of men and women or someone got left out of conversations and so you had to know who, officially in the social sense, went with whom.
Pages 810-811.
Ninety percent of the inhabitants of the world regarded the marriage of almost everybody else as invalid.
Page 811.
To all practical intents, it was sufficient if a couple really assured their friends that they intended to stick together, if possible, for ever. If not, at least for year’s enough to show that they had made a good shot at it.
Page 811.
Society was at last good-natured and was inclined to take the view that if a fellow had faced his punishment and taken it he was pretty well absolved.
Page 812.
A man as a rule does not marry his mistress whilst he has any kick in him. If he still aims at a career it might hinder him supposing she were known to have been his mistress, or of course a fellow who wants to make a career might want to help himself on by making a good marriage.
Page 818.
A man gives his mistress another name if there is any chance of his marrying her so that it may look as if he were marrying someone else when he does it.
Page 818.
Judas Iscariot himself was an old-fashioned ass, once upon a tine.
Page 825.
If a Yorkshireman can quarrel he can live. They were like that.
Page 828.
There was no end to the folly of the English in the country as in the town: they would waste time over everything.
Pages 829-830.
The Dead ought to have all they could get.
Page 837.
It was the worst disservice you could do to your foes not to let them know that remorseless consequences follow determined actions.
Page 838.
A world profits by the example of a steadfast nation.
Page 840.
Beauty and truth have a way of appearing to be akin.
Page 853.
One of the chief torments of the woman who has been abandoned by a man is the sheer thirst of curiosity for material details as to how that man subsequently lives.
Page 855.
If you live with a person who suffers from being put upon a great deal and if that person will not assert his own rights you are apt to believe that your standards as gentleman and Christian are below his, and the experience is lastingly disagreeable.
Page 855.
God is probably - and very rightly - on the side of the stuffy domesticities.
Page 862.
If a ruling class loses the capacity to rule - or the desire - it should abdicate form its privileges and get underground.
Page 887.
Where shall we shepherds go, God’s son to find?
Page 895.