Freya Stark
Freya Stark
Dame Freya Madeline Stark, Mrs Perowne, DBEwas a British explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan, as well as several autobiographical works and essays. She was one of the first non-Arabians to travel through the southern Arabian Deserts...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMemoirist
Date of Birth31 January 1893
CityParis, France
wine good-day glasses
Good days are to be gathered like grapes, to be trodden and bottled into wine and kept for age to sip at ease beside the fire. If the traveler has vintaged well, he need trouble to wander no longer; the ruby moments glow in his glass at will.
thinking looks world
If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.
integrity adaptability fetters
Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.
men sea born
Time is the sea in which men grow, are born, or die.
profound needs body
Few - very few - of our attainments are so profound that they are valid for always; even if they are so, they need adjustment, a straightening here, a loosening there, like an old garment to be fitted to the body ...
eye blue wind
... except in the eyes of a few fanatics (untrustworthy as all lovers) an unmitigated expanse of water is dull even when blue: not in a small boat, where you are part of the winds and currents and tides and are allowed to hold the tiller now and then; but from those decks which the shipping companies with subconscious insight try to make as suburban as possible so that the impact of the monster outside may be lessened, and where the unrecognized boredom is so deep that a wispy smear of smoke on the horizon will queue up a crowd as if for a Valkyrie passing.
people arabia levels
The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues ...
real fairs
Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.
hate book wife
I feel like a divorced wife once my book is published and has left me, and hate to be brought back into intimate contact!
space silence style
Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.
words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.
association silent significance
every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance.
body poor arteries
words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses ...
night thinking voice
I first noticed how the sound of water is like the talk of human voices, and would sometimes wake in the night and listen, thinking that a crowd of people were coming through the woods.