Ioanna

“As Freya Stark herself had put it: ‘To be treated with consideration is, in the case of female travellers, too often synonymous with being prevented from doing what one wants.”
― Lois Pryce, Revolutionary Ride: On the Road to Shiraz, the Heart of Iran

“It is so pleasant to feel that we have succeeded in doing what all the People who Know told us was impossible.”
― Freya Stark, Letters from Syria

“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

“One drop of wine is enough to redden a whole glass of water.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame