H.E. Bates Quotes

#1. Gardens ... should be like lovely, well-shaped girls: all curves, secret corners, unexpected deviations, seductive surprises and then still more curves.

H.E. Bates

#2. The true gardener, like an artist, is never satisfied.

H.E. Bates

#3. 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

#4. A garden should be in a constant state of fluid change, expansion, experiment, adventure; above all it should be an inquisitive, loving, but self-critical journey on the part of its owner.

H.E. Bates

#5. The basis of almost every argument or conclusion I can make is the axiom that the short story can be anything the author decides it shall be; ... In that infinite flexibility, indeed lies the reason why the short story has never been adequately defined.

H.E. Bates

#6. 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

#7. The garden that is finished is dead.

H.E. Bates

#8. 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