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1 " 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
2 " 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. "
3 " 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. "
4 " 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. "
5 " 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. "
6 " 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. "
7 " 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. "