Freya Stark Quotes
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The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares (...) To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live.
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monotony is not to be worshipped as a virtue; nor the marriage bed treated as a coffin for security rather than a couch from which to rise refreshed.
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it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.
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One life is an absurdly small allowance.
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The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.
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Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood.
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I have long come to believe that, more than any other destruction, our word-recklessness is endangering the future of us all.
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The monstrosity of bureaucracy, I thought: always the pint-pot judging the gallon, the scribe's, the door-keeper's world. Always the stupidity of people who feel certain about things they never try to find out. A world that educates people to be ignorant - that is what this world of ours is.
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Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.
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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.
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... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
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Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.
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To feel, and think, and learn - learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense
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Risk is the salt and sugar of life.
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I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving
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Generalizations, one is told, are dangerous. So is life, for that matter, and it is built up on generalization - from the earliest effort of the adventurer who dared to eat a second berry because the first had not killed him.
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It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.
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Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.
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Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.
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... the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed.
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Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.
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Whatever the advantages of the machine may be - and they are many - the very ease of its use is bound to make away with intimacy - the intercourse of human beings, of animals, or of that which we still think of as the natural world.
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The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.
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not wholly consciously, but not quite unconsciously, as far as I can remember, I determined to fashion my future as a sculptor his marble, and there was in it the same mixture of foresight and the unknown. The thing in the mind of the artist takes its way and imposes its form as it wakens under his hand. And so with life.