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
acceptance personality style
Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.
death acceptance successful
An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death.
deals learning love pleasant since universal
Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond, since it deals with what one is and not what one has.
broken miracle world
Love, like broken porcelain, should be wept over and buried, for nothing but a miracle will resuscitate it: but who in this world has not for some wild moments thought to recall the irrecoverable with words?
circles race soul
Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.
alone english-writer feelings quite town
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
carries english-writer eternal event home piece
Christmas... is not an eternal event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.
art ingredients absence
Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.
moving heart thinking
To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.
travel home feelings
The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home.
discipline solitude ordinary
Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.
art travel journey
Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.
life-is allowance
One life is an absurdly small allowance.
intellectual dare
Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?