Englishwoman in America Quotes

“The captain was committed for manslaughter, but escaped the punishment due to his offence, though popular indignation was strongly excited against him.”
― Isabella Lucy Bird, The Englishwoman in America

“The silence of the forest was so solemn, that, remembering the last of the Mohicans, we should not have been the least surprised if an Indian war- whoop had burst upon our startled ears.”
― Isabella Lucy Bird, The Englishwoman in America

“broken only by the note of the distant bull-frog; meteors fell in streams of fire, the crescent”
― Isabella Lucy Bird, The Englishwoman in America

“The tea was not tempting to an English palate; it was stewed, and sweetened with molasses.”
― Isabella Lucy Bird, The Englishwoman in America

“Every one has heard of corduroy roads, but how few have experienced their miseries! They are generally used for traversing swampy ground, and are formed of small pine-trees deprived of their branches, which are laid across the track alongside each other. The wear and tear of travelling soon separates these, leaving gaps between; and when, added to this, one trunk rots away, and another sinks down into the swamp, and another tilts up, you may imagine”
― Isabella Lucy Bird, The Englishwoman in America

“where windows ought to have been were screened by heavy curtains of tarnished moose-deer hide.”
― Isabella Lucy Bird, The Englishwoman in America

“Books alone are cheap and abundant, being the American editions of pirated English works.”
― Isabella Lucy Bird, The Englishwoman in America

“The telegraph costs about 20_l._ per mile,”
― Isabella Lucy Bird, The Englishwoman in America

“There were also numerous blacks in the streets, and, if I might judge from the brilliant colours and good quality of their clothing, they must gain a pretty good living by their industry. A large number of these blacks and their parents were carried away from the States by one of our admirals in the war of 1812, and landed at Halifax. The capital of Nova Scotia looks like a town of cards, nearly all the buildings being of wood.”
― Isabella Lucy Bird, The Englishwoman in America

“They had welcomed the "pale faces" to the "land of the setting sun," and withered up before them, smitten by their crimes. Almost destitute of tradition, their history involved in obscurity, their broad lands filled with their unknown and nameless graves, these mighty races have passed away; they could not pass into slavery, therefore they must die.”
― Isabella Lucy Bird, The Englishwoman in America

“renowned for keeping three millions of Africans in slavery—for wooden nutmegs, paper money, and "fillibuster" expeditions—for carrying out nationally and individually the maxim   "That they may take who have the power,   And they may keep who can.”
― Isabella Lucy Bird, The Englishwoman in America

“Although our feelings are not particularly fraternal, we give the people inhabiting this continent the national cognomen of "Brother Jonathan," while we name individuals "Yankees." We know that they are famous for smoking, spitting, "gouging," and bowie-knives—for monster hotels, steamboat explosions, railway collisions, and repudiated debts.”
― Isabella Lucy Bird, The Englishwoman in America

“Most assuredly that spirit of envious rivalry and depreciating criticism in which many English travellers have written, is greatly to be deprecated, no less than the tone of servile adulation which some writers have adopted; but our American neighbours must recollect that they provoked both the virulent spirit and the hostile caricature by the way in which some of their most popular writers of travels have led an ungenerous onslaught against our institutions and people, and the bitter tone in which their newspaper press, headed by the Tribune, indulges towards”
― Isabella L. Bird, The Englishwoman in America