Freya Stark Quotations

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

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.

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

The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home.

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.

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.

One life is an absurdly small allowance.

Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?

Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.

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.