Notable Quotes: No More Parades by Ford Madox Ford

I’ve been reading Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, a tetralogy (a sequence of four books)set during and after the first world war.  It’s as good as any novel in the high modernist period, which means it is difficult, but transcending.  Perhaps it’s me, but I love the literature from between the world wars.  That’s what I specialized in college.  Let  me also say that Ford may be the best prose writer in English of his era.  And when you consider that’s including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway that is saying a lot.  A heck of a lot. 

I’m going to quote this wonderful gem from the second novel of the tetralogy, No More Parades.  It has nothing to do with writing, as a lot of my notable quotes do though Ford had lots to say on writing, but more on how dejected I’ve been the last two days over some current events.  I’m not going to get into it.  Politicians should be barred from making any military decisions.  Or get better politicians. 

Ford, by the way, volenteered and served in the first world war at the age of forty-one.  The picture I provide below is Ford in uniform, a picture I've never seen before.  He looks rather exhausted and beaten. 

 

No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country... nor for the world, I dare say... None... Gone.

        -Ford Madox Ford