Freya Stark
Freya Madeline Stark was a British-Italian explorer, travel writer, essayist, and photographer who worked across the English, Italian, German, and French languages.
Born in Paris on 31 January 1893, Stark held citizenship of the United Kingdom while being characterized by some sources as British-Italian, reflecting her connection to both countries. She received her education at Bedford College, Royal Holloway at the University of London, and SOAS, University of London. She died on 9 May 1993 in Asolo.
Over the course of her life, Stark received a number of formal distinctions. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and also received the Founder's Medal, the Gold Medal of the Society of Woman Geographers, and the Order of Saint John. These recognitions spanned geographic and civic spheres, consistent with her dual role as explorer and writer.
Stark worked across several related practices: exploration, travel writing, essayistic prose, and photography. Her written output was produced in multiple languages, including English, Italian, German, and French, and her career as a travel writer and essayist formed the consistent thread running through her long life.
Quotes by Freya Stark
Freya Stark's insights on:
Things good in themselves perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.
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.
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...
This is excellence – the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity...
I can’t get over the exciting beauty of New York – the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one’s taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.
The Persian’s mind, like his illuminated manuscripts, does not deal in perspective: two thousand years, if he happens to know anything about them, are as exciting as the day before yesterday...
One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one’s own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.
Few – very few – of our attainments are so profound that they are valid for always; even if they are so, they need adjustment, a straightening here, a loosening there, like an old garment to be fitted to the body...
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.