Freya Stark

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 d...”

“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.”

“Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.”