Isabella Bird Quotes

At the close of my visit, my Hawaiian friends urged me strongly to publish my impressions and experiences, on the ground that the best books already existing, besides being old, treat chiefly of aboriginal customs and habits now extinct, and of the introduction of Christianity and subsequent historical events.

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 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.

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.

The Tibetans are dirty. They wash once a year and, except for festivals, seldom change their clothes till they begin to drop off. They are healthy and hardy; even the women can carry weights of sixty pounds over the passes. They attain extreme old age; their voices are harsh and loud, and their laughter is noisy and hearty.

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.

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.

The situation of Leh is a grand one, the great Kailas range, with its glaciers and snowfields, rising just behind it to the north, its passes alone reaching an altitude of nearly 18,000 feet; while to the south, across a gravelly descent and the Indus Valley, rise great red ranges dominated by snow-peaks exceeding 21,000 feet in altitude.

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.

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

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 'Desert' sweeps up to the walls of Baghdad, but it is a misnomer to call the vast level of rich, stoneless, alluvial soil a desert. It is a dead flat of uninhabited earth; orange colocynth balls, a little wormwood, and some alkaline plants which camels eat, being its chief products. After the inundations, reedy grass grows in the hollows.

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.

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.

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

Above Hilo, broad lands sweeping up cloudwards, with their sugar cane, kalo, melons, pine-apples, and banana groves suggest the boundless liberality of Nature.

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.

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

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.

Water is a beverage which I never enjoyed in purity and perfection before I visited America. It is provided in abundance in the cars, the hotels, the waiting-rooms, the steamers, and even the stores, in crystal jugs or stone filters, and it is always iced. This may be either the result or the cause of the temperance of the people.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Can anything be more grotesque and barbarous than our 'florists' bouquets,' a series of concentric rings of flowers of divers colours, bordered by maidenhair and a piece of stiff lace paper, in which stems, leaves, and even petals are brutally crushed, and the grace and individuality of each flower systematically destroyed?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Slavery, though under modifications which rendered it little more than the apprenticeship of our day, was permitted under the Mosaic dispensation; but it is contrary to the whole tenor of Christianity; and a system which lowers man as an intellectual and responsible being is no less morally than politically wrong.

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.

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.

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.

The 'almighty dollar' is the true divinity, and its worship is universal.

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.

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.

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.