Quotes from Freya Stark

advertisement ... has brought our disregard for truth into the open without even a figleaf to cover it.

From love one can only escape at the price of life itself; and no lessening of sorrow is worth exile from that stream of all things human and divine.

The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence—free of the networks of dead speech.

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

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.

On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light.

We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.

All our acts have sacramental possibilities.

Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes; 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. To disapprove, to condemn-the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness.

The only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war.

One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.

Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.

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.

The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares (...) To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live.

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.

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.

I do think we should be provided with a new body about the age of thirty or so when we have learnt to attend to it with consideration.

The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.

To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.

Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?

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

The most ominous of fallacies - the belief that things can be kept static by inaction

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.

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