...the holy men sat in an atmosphere reeking of antiquity, so thick with the dust of ages that you can't see through it -nor can they.

There is nothing more difficult to measure than the value of visible emotion.

I've been busy with a long memorandum about the whole of our central Arabian relations, which I've just finished. It will now go to all the High and Mighty in every part. One can't do much more than sit and record if one is of my sex, devil take it; one can get the things recorded in the right way and that means, I hope, that unconsciously people will judge events as you think they ought to be judged. But it's small change for doing things, very small change I feel at times.

It's so nice to be a spoke in the wheel, one that helps to turn, not one that hinders.

Until quite recently I've been wholly cut off from [the Shias] because their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don't permit me to veil Nor is it any good trying to make friends through the women - if they were allowed to see me they would veil before me as if I were a man. So you see I appear to be too female for one sex and too male for the other.

To wake in that desert dawn was like waking in the heart of an opal. ... See the desert on a fine morning and die - if you can!

I will have no locked cupboards in my life.