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I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.

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
Like
Hand
Complexes
Arabs
People
American
Prefer
Cheerful
Voice
Complex
Charming
Everyone
Pleasant
Hats
Hands
Lots
Hadn
America
Mets
Voices
Believe
British
Charm
Would
Balance
Manners
Frightful

More quotes by Freya Stark

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The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail in his shell and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you.
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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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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If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.
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youth looks at its world and age looks through it youth must get busy on problems whose outlines stand single and strenuous before it, while age can, with luck, achieve a cosmic private harmony unsuited for action as a rule.
Freya Stark
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Time is the sea in which men grow, are born, or die.
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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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.
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Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.
Freya Stark
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The language of salesmanship was no doubt born with the first fashions in fig leaves in the garden of Eden. A strange concept has grown around it: if something is to be sold, inaccuracy is not immoral. Hence the art of advertisement - untruthfulness combined with repetition.
Freya Stark
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The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.
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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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.
Freya Stark
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A work of art is static and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.
Freya Stark
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We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.
Freya Stark
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Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.
Freya Stark
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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.
Freya Stark
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Manners are like zero in arithmetic. They may not be much in themselves, but they are capable of adding a great deal of value to everything else.
Freya Stark
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Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.
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