Freya Stark - People Quotes

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The monstrosity of bureaucracy, I thought: always the pint-pot judging the gallon, the scribe's, the door-keeper's world. Always the stupidity of people who feel certain about things they never try to find out. A world that educates people to be ignorant — that is what this world of ours is.

Freya Stark
I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.

Freya Stark
She had a genius for forgetting her own mistakes as well as other people's, which is in its way a form of generosity.

Freya Stark
The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues.

Freya Stark
One is apt to think of people's affection as a fixed quantity, instead of a sort of moving sea with tide always going out or coming in but still fundamentally there.

Freya Stark
There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world — the settled and the nomad — and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong.

Freya Stark
Most people, after accomplishing something, use it over and over again like a gramophone record till it cracks, forgetting that the past is just the stuff with which to make more future.

Freya Stark
I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving

Freya Stark
I first noticed how the sound of water is like the talk of human voices, and would sometimes wake in the night and listen, thinking that a crowd of people were coming through the woods.

Freya Stark
I want to be one of those people who are always to be found at home, nice restful people whom everybody likes because they give a feeling of permanence to this rushing world.

Freya Stark
This is a monstrous country.... Everything in life or death is provided for you, as long as you are contented to have it exactly like everybody else.... One ought not to make sweeping statements about countries one doesn't know — but a people that prides itself on monotony deserves it.

Freya Stark
I do dislike people with Moral Aims. Everyone asks me why I learn Arabic, and when I say I just like it, they looked shocked and incredulous.

Freya Stark
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