Freya Stark

“Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.”

“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.”

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

“Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.”

“Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.”

“Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.”

“The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you”

“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.”

“Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.”

“The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.”

“If we are strong, and have faith in life and its richness of surprises, and hold the rudder steadily in our hands. I am sure we will sail into quiet and pleasent waters for our old age.”

“Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.”

“What a strange revelation of self-esteem it is when people only love those who think and feel as they do - an extension of themselves, in fact! Even Christianity does not cure us, since one cannot feel right without assuming that the rest must be wrong. Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself: I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates.”