Top 72 Isabella Bird Quotes
#1. Surely one advantage of traveling is that, while it removes much prejudice against foreigners and their customs, it intensifies tenfold one's appreciation of the good at home, and, above all, of the quietness and purity of English domestic life.
Isabella Bird
#2. The rush of a herd of bellowing yaks at a wild gallop, waving their huge tails, is a grand sight.
Isabella Bird
#3. 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.
Isabella Bird
#4. 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.
Isabella Bird
#5. Grandeur and sublimity, not softness, are the features of Estes Park. The glades which begin so softly are soon lost in the dark primaeval forests, with their peaks of rosy granite and their stretches of granite blocks piled and poised by nature in some mood of fury.
Isabella Bird
#6. 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.
Isabella Bird
#7. 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.
Isabella Bird
#8. Above Hilo, broad lands sweeping up cloudwards, with their sugar cane, kalo, melons, pine-apples, and banana groves suggest the boundless liberality of Nature.
Isabella Bird
#9. I live in the country. I'm a bird-watcher, an oyster-raiser. You know, I'll do anything that - raise dogs for the blind as a volunteer.
Isabella Rossellini
#10. I have just dropped into the very place I have been seeking, but in everything it exceeds all my dreams.
Isabella Bird
#11. Oh! To be beyond the pale once more, out of civilization into savagery? I abhor civilization!
Isabella L. Bird
#12. Everyone acknowledges that dinner parties are equally dull in London and Paris, in Calcutta and in New York, unless the next neighbour happens to be peculiarly agreeable.
Isabella Bird
#13. Oahu in the distance, a group of grey, barren peaks rising verdureless out of the lonely sea, was not an exception to the rule that the first sight of land is a disappointment.
Isabella Bird
#14. 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.
Isabella Bird
#15. 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.
Isabella Bird
#16. The Shat-el-Arab is a noble river or estuary. From both its Persian and Turkish shores, however, mountains have disappeared, and dark forests of date palms intersected by canals fringe its margin heavily, and extend to some distance inland.
Isabella Bird
#17. The Rocky Mountains realize - nay, exceed - the dream of my childhood. It is magnificent, and the air is life-giving.
Isabella Bird
#18. The Japanese look most diminutive in European dress. Each garment is a misfit and exaggerates the miserable physique and the national defects of concave chests and bow legs. The lack of 'complexion' and of hair upon the face makes it nearly impossible to judge of the ages of men.
Isabella Bird
#19. Japan offers as much novelty perhaps as an excursion to another planet.
Isabella Bird
#20. I went to the States with that amount of prejudice which seems the birthright of every English person, but I found that, under the knowledge of the Americans which can be attained by a traveller mixing in society in every grade, these prejudices gradually melted away.
Isabella Bird
#21. The plantations in the Hilo district enjoy special advantages, for by turning some of the innumerable mountain streams into flumes, the owners can bring a great part of their cane and all their wood for fuel down to the mills without other expense than the original cost of the woodwork.
Isabella Bird
#22. In traveling, there is nothing like dissecting people's statements, which are usually colored by their estimate of the powers or likings of the person spoken to, making all reasonable inquiries, and then pertinaciously but quietly carrying out one's own plans.
Isabella L. Bird
#23. My first yak was fairly quiet and looked a noble steed with my Mexican saddle and gay blanket among rather than upon his thick black locks. His back seemed as broad as that of an elephant, and with his slow, sure, resolute step, he was like a mountain in motion.
Isabella Bird
#24. An elephant always puts his foot into the hole which another elephant's foot has made so that a frequented track is nothing but a series of pits filled with mud and water.
Isabella Bird
#25. 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.
Isabella Bird
#26. A traveller must buy his own experience, and success or failure depends mainly on personal idiosyncrasies.
Isabella Bird
#27. Writing generally, it may be said that in design, roof, and general aspect, Japanese Buddhist temples are all alike. The sacred architectural idea expresses itself in nearly the same form always.
Isabella Bird
#28. Malacca is such a rest after the crowds of Japan and the noisy hurry of China! Its endless afternoon remains unbroken except by the dreamy, colored, slow-moving Malay life which passes below the hill. There is never any hurry or noise.
Isabella Bird
#29. The Tigris in parts is wonderfully tortuous, and at one great bend, 'The Devil's Elbow,' a man on foot can walk the distance in less than an hour which takes the steamer four hours to accomplish.
Isabella Bird
#30. People live more happily than any that I have seen elsewhere. It is very cheerful to live among people whose faces are not soured by the east wind, or wrinkled by the worrying effort to "keep up appearances," which deceive nobody;
Isabella L. Bird
#31. I was heartily sorry to leave Leh, with its dazzling skies and abounding colour and movement, its stirring topics of talk, and the culture and exceeding kindness of the Moravian missionaries. Helpfulness was the rule.
Isabella Bird
#32. The 'almighty dollar' is the true divinity, and its worship is universal.
Isabella Bird
#33. Malacca fascinates me more and more daily. There is, among other things, a mediaevalism about it. The noise of the modern world reaches it only in the faintest echoes; its sleep is almost dreamless. Its sensations seem to come out of books read in childhood.
Isabella Bird
#34. Poverty brings one blessing in Turkey - the poor man is of necessity a monogamist.
Isabella Bird
#35. The kimono, haori, and girdle, and even the long hanging sleeves, have only parallel seams, and these are only tacked or basted, as the garments, when washed, are taken to pieces, and each piece, after being very slightly stiffened, is stretched upon a board to dry.
Isabella Bird
#36. Truly a good horse, good ground to gallop on, and sunshine, make up the sum of enjoyable travelling.
Isabella L. Bird
#37. Americans specially love superlatives. The phrases 'biggest in the world,' 'finest in the world,' are on all lips. Unless President Hayes is a strong man, they will soon come to boast that their government is composed of the 'biggest scoundrels' in the world.
Isabella Bird
#38. The Americans will never solve the Indian problem till the Indian is extinct. They have treated them after a fashion which has intensified their treachery and 'devilry' as enemies, and as friends reduces them to a degraded pauperism, devoid of the very first elements of civilization.
Isabella Bird
#39. The Tigris is so fierce and rapid, and swallows its alluvial banks so greedily, that it is probable that some of the buildings described by the Hebrew traveller Benjamin of Tudela as existing in the twelfth century were long since carried away.
Isabella Bird
#40. Unlike many other places, Hilo is more fascinating on closer acquaintance - so fascinating that it is hard to write about it in plain prose.
Isabella Bird
#41. I still vote civilization a nuisance, society a humbug and all conventionality a crime.
Isabella L. Bird
#42. It is a strange life up here on the mountain side, but I like it, and never yearn after civilization.
Isabella L. Bird
#43. Yet, after all, they were not bad souls; and though he failed so grotesquely, he did his incompetent best.
Isabella L. Bird
#44. The breadfruit is a superb tree, about 60 feet high, with deep green, shining leaves, a foot broad, sharply and symmetrically cut, worthy, from their exceeding beauty of form, to take the place of the acanthus in architectural ornament, and throwing their pale green fruit into delicate contrast.
Isabella Bird
#45. I suppose that few people ever forget the first sight of a palm-tree of any species. I vividly remember seeing one for the first time at Malaga, but the coco-palm groves of the Pacific have a strangeness and witchery of their own.
Isabella Bird
#46. If Japanese tea 'stands,' it acquires a coarse bitterness and an unwholesome astringency. Milk and sugar are not used.
Isabella Bird
#47. If one's memories of Baghdad women were only of those to be seen in the streets, they would be of leathery, wrinkled faces, prematurely old, figures which have lost all shape, and henna-stained hands crinkled and deformed by toil.
Isabella Bird
#48. I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh.
Isabella L. Bird
#49. Only the long melancholy call to prayer, or the wail of women over the dead, or the barking of dogs, breaks the silence which at sunset falls as a pall over Baghdad.
Isabella Bird
#50. 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.
Isabella Bird
#51. I lived among the Japanese, and saw their mode of living, in regions unaffected by European contact.
Isabella Bird
#52. The scarcely audible whisper of soft airs through the trees morning and evening, rain drops falling gently, and the murmur of drowsy surges far below, alone break the stillness.
Isabella L. Bird
#53. 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.
Isabella Bird
#54. [On Malaysia:] Mr. Darwin says so truly that a visit to the tropics (and such tropics) is like a visit to a new planet. This new wonder-world, so enchanting, tantalising, intoxicating, makes me despair, for I cannot make you see what I am seeing!
Isabella Bird
#55. There are eight or nine leading varieties of rice grown in Japan, all of which, except an upland species, require mud, water, and much puddling and nasty work. Rice is the staple food and the wealth of Japan. Its revenues were estimated in rice. Rice is grown almost wherever irrigation is possible.
Isabella Bird
#56. I sat down and knitted for some time - my usual resource under discouraging circumstances.
Isabella L. Bird
#57. Leh has few of what Europeans regard as travelling necessaries. The brick tea which I purchased from a Lhassa trader was disgusting. I afterwards understood that blood is used in making up the blocks. The flour was gritty, and a leg of mutton turned out to be a limb of a goat of much experience.
Isabella Bird
#58. No house was so poor as not to have its 'family altar,' its shelf of wooden gods, and table of offerings. A religious atmosphere pervades Tibet and gives it a singular sense of novelty.
Isabella Bird
#59. 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.
Isabella Bird
#60. One of the most painful things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children - only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old.
Isabella Bird
#61. The Malays, like the Japanese, have a most rigid epistolary etiquette and set forms for letter writing. Letters must consist of six parts and are so highly elaborate that the scribes who indite them are almost looked upon as litterateurs.
Isabella Bird
#62. Baghdad is altogether built of chrome-yellow kiln-dried bricks.
Isabella Bird
#63. Four hours after leaving Kornah, we passed the reputed tomb of Ezra the prophet. At a distance and in the moonlight it looked handsome. There is a buttressed river wall, and above it some long flat-roofed buildings, the centre one surmounted by a tiled dome.
Isabella Bird
#64. Mauna Kea from Hilo has a shapely aspect, for its top is broken into peaks, said to be the craters of extinct volcanoes, but my eyes seek the dome-like curve of Mauna Loa with far deeper interest, for it is as yet an unfinished mountain.
Isabella Bird
#65. An American store is generally a very extensive apartment, handsomely decorated, the roof frequently supported on marble pillars. The owner or clerk is seen seated by his goods, absorbed in the morning paper - probably balancing himself on one leg of his chair, with a spittoon by his side.
Isabella Bird
#67. I dreamt of bears so vividly that I woke with a furry death hug at my throat, but feeling quite refreshed.
Isabella L. Bird
#68. 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.
Isabella Bird
#69. On the whole, I find that it is best to adopt as far as possible the travelling equipments of the country in which one travels. The muleteers and servants understand them better, and if anything goes wrong or wears out, it can be repaired or replaced.
Isabella Bird
#71. Cock-fighting, which has attained to the dignity of a literature of its own, is the popular Malay sport; but the grand sport is a tiger and buffalo fight, reserved for rare occasions, however, on account of its expense. Cock-fighting is a source of gigantic gambling and desperate feuds.
Isabella Bird
#72. Everybody seized upon a bit of the beast. The Sultan claimed the liver, which, when dried and powdered, is worth twice its weight in gold as medicine.
Isabella Bird
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