H.E. Bates > Quotes

“It is one of the oddest and sometimes one of the most charming characteristics of English weather that at times one season borrows complete days from another, spring from summer, winter from spring. And it may be that these milky days of winter, which seem borrowed from April, are automatically filled with the sadness of things out of their time.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods

“This fusion of wood and water is an entrancing thing. Without the wood the stream would be nothing: a mere thin watercourse winding through its flat meadows. Without the water the wood, on its slope and with its air of quietness and mystery and of being a world within itself, could not help being a constantly delightful thing. But water and wood, together, shading and watering and bounding each other, each give to the other something which the other does not possess, the wood giving to the stream something solid and shadowy and immemorial, the stream giving to the wood all the incomparable movement and twinkling transience of moving water, the tree shadows standing deep in the stream, the reflection of sunlight flickering a kind of waterlight up into the shadowy branches of pine and alder. The wood and the water are here, in fact, one, for each other and with each other. It is a fusion that is almost perfect.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods

“Every morning Mrs Eglantine sat at the round bamboo bar of the New Pacific Hotel and drank her breakfast. This consisted of two quick large brandies, followed by several slower ones. By noon breakfast had become lunch and by two o'clock the pouches under and above Mrs Eglantine's bleared blue eyes began to look like large puffed pink prawns.”
― H.E. Bates, Seven by Five

“Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and bottling fruit and preserves and lemon curd and drying flowers for winter. She felt, like Halibut, that things were not as they used to be. The synthetic curse of modern times lay thick on everything. There was everywhere a sad drift from Nature.”
― H.E. Bates

“And here, it seems to me, is much of the secret of the charm of woods in England. A wood should never be vast. The best woods are small, a few acres in extent, not much more than copses. The word forest creates in the mind a feeling of grandeur, of something primeval.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods

“If I shut my eyes it returns: the evocation of a whole wood, a whole world of wood-darkness and flowers and birds and late summer silence, of a million leaves turning mellowly to death. It becomes then more than the mere memory of a wood, the first and the best wood I have ever known. It is the redistillation of another and more lovely world.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods

“There are those who talk of the evil spirit of the woods. But for me there is only one evil spirit of woods: the keeper. I suppose that, somewhere, there must be keepers who are pleasant, considerate, friendly men who love their wives and smile and exhibit other signs of common humanity. But it has never been my luck to meet one.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods

“A wood at night, or even more at twilight, can be a strange place. Fear begins to come more quickly in a wood, with darkness and twilight, than in any other place I know.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods

“Well, we have to do something. There are all sorts of rumours about soldiers coming up."
"These people are full of rumours. They love rumours." Paterson stood watching the bridge. "Their whole life is a rumour.”
― H.E. Bates

“Blowsily, frowsily, comfortably, toothlessly, Mrs Candleton was sleeping away the afternoon in her hair-curlers and her pinnafore.”
― H.E. Bates, Seven by Five

“All day, after two days and nights of rain, water had been rising in the dykes and now it was creeping rapidly up the five stone arches of the bridge where the she stood watching the wide rainy valley up which the tongue of river finally lost itself in a gray country of winter elms.”
― H.E. Bates, The Feast of July

“The cookery books will give you a thousand finicky devices, mushrooms in this, mushrooms in that, but there is only one way—to fry them, simply with bacon, until they swim in their black fragrant juice.”
― H.E. Bates, Through the Woods

“But I drew the line, one evening, at Jerry O'Keefe's, the fish-shop where people crammed in late for hot plates of peas and chips and yellow-battered fish, in a kind of boiler house of steaming fat, after the last cinema show or the old theatre.
'But why?' she said. 'Why? It looks fun in there.'
I said I did not think it the place for her, and she said:
'You talk like a parson or something. You talk just like old Miss Crouch.'
'I'm not taking you,' I said.
'Why? If it's good enough for these people it's good enough for us, isn't it?'
'No.'
'That's because you're really an awful snob,' she said. 'You're too uppish to be seen in there.'
'It's not myself,' I said. 'It's you.'
'Are you going to take me or aren't you?' she said.
'No,' I said. 'I'm not.'
She turned and walked down the street. I stood for a moment alone, stubbornly, watching her swinging away into darkness out of the steamy, glowing gas-light. Then I had a moment of sickness when I felt she was walking out of my life, that I had given her impossible offence and that I should never see her again.
'Wait,' I said, 'wait. Don't go like that. I'll take you.”
― H.E. Bates , Love for Lydia

“Paterson was not a member of the club. [..] When Paterson wanted to swim he took a towel and swam in the river naked and his Burmese boy stood on the bank with his bath-robe and waited to rub him down. 'I like to swim in water, not people,' was a remark of Paterson's that for a long time went round the club.”
― H.E. Bates, The Jacaranda Tree

“Beautiful evening, ain’t it?’ Pop said. Once again, caught in his own web of enchantment, he turned to stare at an evening distilled now into even deeper gold by the lower angle of light falling across still seas of buttercups and long-curled milky waves of may.”
― H.E. Bates, The Darling Buds of May: Inspiration for the ITV drama The Larkins starring Bradley Walsh

“All that sultry May evening I danced physically with Christie, but in spirit with Tina. That special duality of the Davenports, of being able to haunt in absence, was so manifestly strong that several times I only saved myself by the sheerest miracle from calling the girl in the pale primrose dress by the wrong name.”
― H.E. Bates, The Four Beauties

“Curious word, sanguine. Odd that any one word can mean both optimistic and bloody. But it too fitted the hour.”
― H. E. Bates

“The major was very interested in the mountains, and we in turn were very interested in the major, a spare spruce man of nearly sixty who wore light shantung summer suits and was very studious of his appearance generally, and very specially of his smooth grey hair. He also had three sets of false teeth, of which he was very proud: one for mornings, one for evenings, and one for afternoons.”
― H.E. Bates, Seven by Five

“In his left hand he was holding aloft the German flag; with his right he was shaking hands in smiling effusion with a bald-headed man whose face looked like a pot of lard that has boiled over and eventually congealed in white, flabby, unhealthy drifts and folds.”
― H.E. Bates, The Four Beauties