Lafcadio Hearn QUOTES

2 " Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio. "

― Lafcadio Hearn , Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn

3 " The poet or the story-teller who cannot give the reader a little ghostly pleasure at times never can be either a really great writer or a great thinker. "

― Lafcadio Hearn

4 " ..and Umétsu remembered that goblins were wont to assume feminine shapes after dark, in order to deceive and destroy men. "

― Lafcadio Hearn , A Japanese Miscellany: Strange Stories, Folklore Gleanings, Studies Here & There (The Writings on Japan by Lafcadio Hearn: Vol. 2)

5 " A very successful method of dragon-fly-catching..is to use a captured female dragon-fly as a decoy. One end of a long thread is fastened to the insect's tail, and the other end of the thread to a flexible rod. By moving the rod in a particular way the female can be kept circling on her wings at the full length of the thread; and a male is soon attracted. As soon as he clings to the female, a slight jerk of the rod will bring both insects into the angler's hand. With a single female for lure, it is easy to capture eight or ten males in succession "

― Lafcadio Hearn , A Japanese Miscellany: Strange Stories, Folklore Gleanings, Studies Here & There (The Writings on Japan by Lafcadio Hearn: Vol. 2)

6 " A most extraordinary device for catching dragon-flies is used by the children of the province of Kii. They get a long hair, - a woman's hair, - and attach a very small pebble to each end of it, so as to form a miniature "bolas"; and this they sling high into the air. A dragon-fly pounces upon the passing object; but the moment that he seizes it, the hair twists round his body, and the weight of the pebbles brings him to the ground. "

― Lafcadio Hearn , A Japanese Miscellany: Strange Stories, Folklore Gleanings, Studies Here & There (The Writings on Japan by Lafcadio Hearn: Vol. 2)

7 " also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid, - deliciously afraid. never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost, - a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell... and, considering the possibility of being doomed to the state of a jiki-ketsu-geki, I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutame, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know. "

― Lafcadio Hearn , Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

8 " The tea ceremony requires years of training and practice ... yet the whole of this art, as to its detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible. "

― Lafcadio Hearn , Lafcadio Hearn's Japan: An Anthology of his Writings on the Country and Its People

9 " Can we ever hope for a Natural History with colored plates that will show us how the world appears to the faceted eyes of a dragon-fly? "

― Lafcadio Hearn , A Japanese Miscellany: Strange Stories, Folklore Gleanings, Studies Here & There (The Writings on Japan by Lafcadio Hearn: Vol. 2)

10 " A che pro disegnare l'Impossibile? Perché è la verità, forse velata e mascherata, ma eterna. "

― Lafcadio Hearn , Ombre giapponesi

11 " New Orleans is a place that actually resembles no other city on the face of the earth, yet it recalls vague memories of a hundred cities. "

― Lafcadio Hearn

12 " We owe more to our illusions than to our knowledge "

― Lafcadio Hearn , Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan

13 " There is scarcely any great author in European literature, old or new, who has not distinguished himself in his treatment of the supernatural. In English literature, I believe there is no exception from the time of the Anglo-Saxon poets to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to our own day. And this introduces us to the consideration of a general and remarkable fact, a fact that I do not remember to have seen in any books, but which is of very great philosophical importance: there is something ghostly in all great art, whether of literature, music, sculpture, or architecture. It touches something within us that relates to infinity "

― Lafcadio Hearn

14 " It may remain for us to learn,... that our task is only beginning; and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;--that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;--that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;--and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives. "

― Lafcadio Hearn , Out of the East

15 " But I confess that "my mind to me a kingdom is"--not! Rather it is a fantastical republic, daily troubled by more revolutions than ever occurred in South America ... "

― Lafcadio Hearn , Gleanings in Buddha-Fields

16 " It is an atmosphere peculiar to the place; and, because of it, the sunshine in Horai is whiter than any other sunshine, - a milky light that never dazzles, - astonishingly clear, but very soft. This atmosphere is not of our human period: it is enormously old, - so old that I feel afraid when I try to think how old it is; - and it is not a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. It is not made of air at all, but of ghost, - the substance of quintillions of quintillions of generations of souls blended into one immense translucency, - souls of people who thought in ways never resembling our ways. "

― Lafcadio Hearn , Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things

17 " Perhaps, after trillions of ages burning in different dynasties of suns, the very best of me may come together again. "

― Lafcadio Hearn

18 " How divine the coming of the morning,—the coming of the Sun,—exorcising the shadowy terrors of the night with infinite restoration of color! I look upon the woods, and they are not the same: the palms have vanished; the cypresses have fled away; trees young and comely and brightly green replace them. A hand is laid upon my shoulder,—the hand of the gray Captain: 'Go forward, and see what you have never seen before.' Even as he speaks, our boat, turning sharply, steams out of the green water into—what can I call it?—a flood of fluid crystal,—a river of molten diamond,—a current of liquid light? "

― Lafcadio Hearn , Leaves from the Diary of an Impressionist; Early Writings by Lafcadio Hearn

19 " Nature has no consolation for us. Out of her formlessness issues forms which return to formlessness,——that is all. The plant becomes clay; the clay becomes a plant. When the plant turns to clay, what becomes of the vibration which was its life? Does it go on existing viewlessly, like the forces that shape spectres of frondage in the frost upon a window-pane? "

― Lafcadio Hearn

20 " On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees—where there are any trees—all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks . . . I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair,—bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed;—for the sea is devouring the land. "

― Lafcadio Hearn , Chita: A Memory of Last Island

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