Christina Stead Quotes
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She would never again try to knit even one stitch in the long chain of their married life. She hated all that was to come.
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We are primitive men; we taboo what we desire and need. How did the denying of love come to be associated with the idea of morality.
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Tell Papa I'm a communist, but a bad communist. I use a lipstick made by a Russian noble, Prince Matchabelli. (It sounds Italian though.).
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In our early days she went with me to the eugenics meetings, but that period soon ended.
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"I’m afraid to write to your father: he criticizes my spelling,” sneered Henny. “And it appears I know nothing about geography. Hang his stuck-up conceit.
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It has never worked - it never will. I don’t know what you want to hang on to me for. You should have let me go at the beginning. Why did you beg me to marry you at Frederick that day? I would have got another man.
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The man with a peaceful nest to fly home to, has everything; there is no effort he will not make for his mate and offspring.
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Anyone would think a thin stick like me, weak and miserable would go down with everything: do you think I get more than my cough every winter? I bet I live till ninety, with all my aches and pains. To think that's fifty more years of the Great-I-Am.
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Sam faced something he had never conceived of in all his life—the triumph of calumny.
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By smiling, we turn devils into angels, enemies into friends; the cup of poison becomes the loving cup.
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Her poverty was naked on the empty streets, and if no one walked abroad she felt all the more ghastly, like a wretched sinner in the sight of God.
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When she was sitting staring into space, communing with her disillusion, his heart would be wrung by their unloving beauty.
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To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with.
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Ye want to tell the plain truth all your life, woman, and speak straight; otherwise ye get to seeing double.
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Therefore,” he reasoned with himself, “it is love coming to claim me: I have been so long without love, hated at home, living in terror of my children’s lives: it is pure, tender, normal love.
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It is splendid - to be - loved! If we only - can - live up - to the thoughts - of us - by them - that love us!
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She belonged to the great race of human beings who regard life as a series of piracies of all powers.
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It was the rotten fabric woven by evil, the overnight sham bulwarks of enemies of the people; it would burn to ash at the match of truth.
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I know your breed; all your fine officials debauch the younger girls who are afraid to lose their jobs: that's as old as Washington.
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What luck have I? I don’t suppose you’ll be anything but a cheap little accountant yourself - you haven’t any chance to make money with a father like that.
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I bet I live till ninety, with all my aches and pains. To think that’s fifty more years of the Great I-Am. No wonder I want to make away with myself. Who wouldn’t?
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It's easy to make money. You put up the sign Bank and someone walks in and hands you his money. The façade is everything.
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He wanted to be angry, his mission was was to be angry, and he had nothing to be angry about; the world would not let him rave, this was the great injustice he suffered from.
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About myself - no. I'm unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.