For a young man to start his career with a love affair with an older woman was quite de rigueur ... Of course, it must not go on for too long. An apprenticeship was a very different thing from a career.

See the last orange roses, how they blow / Deeper and heavier than in their prime, / In one defiant flame before they go.

that pathetic short-cut suggested by Nature the supreme joker as a remedy for our loneliness, that ephemeral communion which we persuade ourselves to be of the spirit when it is in fact only of the body - durable not even in memory!

I like muddling things up; and if a herb looks nice in a border, then why not grow it there? Why not grow anything anywhere so long as it looks right where it is? That is, surely, the art of gardening.

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

Violence, passion, indignation, loyalty, integrity, incorruptibility, shameless egoism, generosity, excitability, energy, a hundred horse-power drive - none of it very subtle: Ethel [Smyth] didn't deal in pastel shades, she went for the stronger colors, the blood-red, anything deep and pumping out of the arteries of the heart.