The Valleys of the Assassins Quotes

“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.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels

“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 a 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...Modern education ignores the need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be doing something always, as if one could never sit quietly and let the puppet show unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery and wonder while, like a wave lifting us into new seas, the history of the world develops around us.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels

“The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid that one is and no one is surprised. When the police stopped our car at Bedrah and enquired where we were staying, the chauffeur, who did not know, told him to ask the lady.
"That is no good," said the policeman. "She's a woman."
"Yes," said the chauffeur, "but she knows everything. She knows Arabic."
The policeman asked me.
I had not the vaguest idea of where we were staying, and looked at him with the blank idiocy which he thought perfectly natural.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels

“If I were asked to enumerate the pleasures of travel, this would be one of the greatest among them - that so often and so unexpectedly you meet the best in human nature, and seeing it so by surprise and often with a most improbable background, you come, with a sense of pleasant thankfulness, to realize how widely scattered in the world are goodness and courtesy and the love of immaterial things, fair blossoms found in every climate, on every soil.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels

“It is a remarkable fact that the people who do things by hand still find time to add to their work some elaboration of mere beauty which makes it a joy to look on, while our machine-made tools, which could do so at much less cost, are too utilitarian to afford any ornament. It used to give me daily pleasure in Teheran to see the sacks in which refuse is carried off the streets woven with a blue and red decorative pattern: but can one imagine a borough council in Leeds or Birmingham expressing a delicate fancy of this kind? Beauty, according to these, is what one buys for the museum: pots and pans, taps and door-handles, though one has to look at them twenty times a day, have no call to be beautiful. So we impoverish our souls and keep our lovely things for rare occasions, even as our lovely thoughts - wasting the most of life in pondering domestic molehills or the Stock Exchange, among objects as ugly as the less attractive forms of sin.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels

“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.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins, And Other Persian Travels