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Isabella Bird Quotes - IQDb - Internet Quotes Database

Quotes from Isabella Bird


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Grapes are grown in such profusion in the Southern and Western States that I have seen damaged bunches thrown to the pigs. Americans find it difficult to understand how highly this fruit is prized in England.


Yokohama does not improve on further acquaintance. It has a dead-alive look. It has irregularity without picturesqueness, and the grey sky, grey sea, grey houses, and grey roofs, look harmoniously dull.


The rush of a herd of bellowing yaks at a wild gallop, waving their huge tails, is a grand sight.


Poverty brings one blessing in Turkey - the poor man is of necessity a monogamist.


It is extremely interesting to live in a private house and to see the externalities, at least, of domestic life in a Japanese middle-class home.


If Japanese tea 'stands,' it acquires a coarse bitterness and an unwholesome astringency. Milk and sugar are not used.


I lived among the Japanese, and saw their mode of living, in regions unaffected by European contact.


Baghdad is altogether built of chrome-yellow kiln-dried bricks.


To a person sitting quietly at home, Rocky Mountain traveling, like Rocky Mountain scenery, must seem very monotonous; but not so to me, to whom the pure, dry mountain air is the elixir of life.


The Sandwich Islands are not the same as Otaheite nor as the Fijis, from which they are distant about 4,000 miles, nor are their people of the same race. The natives are not cannibals, and it is doubtful if they ever were so. Their idols only exist in missionary museums.


The Malays can hardly be said to have an indigenous literature, for it is almost entirely derived from Persia, Siam, Arabia, and Java. Arabic is their sacred language.


The traveller who aspires to reach the highlands of Tibet from Kashmir cannot be borne along in a carriage or hill-cart. For much of the way, he is limited to a foot pace, and if he has regard to his horse, he walks down all rugged and steep descents, which are many, and dismounts at most bridges.


An Englishman bears with patience any ridicule which foreigners cast upon him. John Bull never laughs so loudly as when he laughs at himself; but the Americans are nationally sensitive and cannot endure that good-humoured raillery which jests at their weaknesses and foibles.


A traveller must buy his own experience, and success or failure depends mainly on personal idiosyncrasies.


The Rocky Mountains realize - nay, exceed - the dream of my childhood. It is magnificent, and the air is life-giving.


The cocoa-nut palm grows best near salt water, no matter how loose and sandy the soil is, and in these congenial circumstances needs neither manure nor care of any kind. It bends lovingly toward the sea and drops its ripe fruit into it.


Bugs are a great pest in Colorado. They come out of the earth, infest the wooden walls, and cannot be got rid of by any amount of cleanliness. Many careful housewives take their beds to pieces every week and put carbolic acid on them.


The Malays have many queer notions about tigers and usually only speak of them in whispers, because they think that certain souls of human beings who have departed this life have taken up their abode in these beasts, and in some places, for this reason, they will not kill a tiger unless he commits some specially bad aggression.


The word 'aloha,' in foreign use, has taken the place of every English equivalent. It is a greeting, a farewell, thanks, love, goodwill. Aloha looks at you from tidies and illuminations; it meets you on the roads and at house-doors. It is conveyed to you in letters: the air is full of it.


Other lands may have their charms, and the sunny skies of other climes may be regretted, but it is with pride and gladness that the wanderer sets foot again on British soil, thanking God for the religion and the liberty which have made this weather-beaten island in a northern sea to be the light and glory of the world.