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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.

Freya Stark

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Freya Stark
Age: 100 †
Born: 1893
Born: January 31
Died: 1993
Died: May 9
Author
Essayist
Explorer
Mountaineer
Photographer
Travel Writer
Traveler
Writer
Paris
France
Dame Freya Madeline Stark
Even
Rounds
Every
Corners
Life
Avoid
Unexpectedness
Refuse
Unawares
Wise
Catches
Waiting
Altogether
Women
Corner
Live
Round

More quotes by Freya Stark

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I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number of defeats.
Freya Stark
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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.
Freya Stark
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This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.
Freya Stark
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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.
Freya Stark
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The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech.
Freya Stark
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Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.
Freya Stark
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The camel carries on his dreary circular task with his usual slow and pompous step and head poised superciliously, as if it were a ritual affair above the comprehension of the vulgar and no doubt he comforts himself for the dullness of life by a sense of virtue, like many other formalists beside him.
Freya Stark
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I suspect anyone self-satisfied enough to refuse lawful pleasures: we are not sufficiently rich in our separate resources to reject the graces of the universe when offered.
Freya Stark
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Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.
Freya Stark
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What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself.
Freya Stark
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One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.
Freya Stark
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The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love.
Freya Stark
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every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.
Freya Stark
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I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving
Freya Stark
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There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
Freya Stark
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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.
Freya Stark
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The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home.
Freya Stark
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The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.
Freya Stark
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Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.
Freya Stark
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I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.
Freya Stark