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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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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This is one of the charms of the desert, that removing as it does nearly all the accessories of life, we see the thin thread of necessities on which our human existence is suspended.
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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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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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it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.
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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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Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.
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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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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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Revolution is man's normal activity, and if he is wise he will grade it slowly so that it may be almost imperceptible - otherwise it will jerk in fits and starts and cause discomfort.
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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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It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.
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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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Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.
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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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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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Risk is the salt and sugar of life.
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... I cannot think a civilization worth having that does not encourage and enable its subjects to spend something, not extorted by governments but freely given to keep wretchedness at least from the streets they walk through day by day.
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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.
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I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving