73 Quotes by Lafcadio Hearn

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.

The Shadow-maker shapes forever.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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