Freya Stark

To awaken alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.

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

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.

Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.

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

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.

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

Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.

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

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

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 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.