Christina Stead Quotes
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And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog!
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They were all eccentric, touched, ill-intentioned, ignorant, superstitious, avaricious, or full members of nitwitry.
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A breeze had arisen and trailed faintly through the house like a sick woman in a long dressing gown, and with it the odor of a blown-out jet, under the oatmeal.
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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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The sensuality, delicacy of literature does not exist for me; only the passion, energy and struggle… Most of my friends deplore this: they are always telling me what I should leave out in order to have success. But I know that nothing has more success in the end than an intelligent ferocity.
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Money goes where money is, money yearns where money is.
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It is women who must clean up the mess men make, the mess everything makes
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Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that. Why was I ever born?
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Am I to spend the next twenty years in the high-minded company of a smug Philistine who doesn’t so much as make me a decent husband?
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Why doesn’t he drop down dead? Was he sent by God to worry women?
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You do not know what she did not only to me but to the little children. She has tortured them, turned them against me, lied to them.
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It was only much later that I found out hardness worked better than love.
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"Nothing hurts me if I don’t want it to,” she told him.
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Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.
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Henny was beautifully, wholeheartedly vile: she asked no quarter and gave none to the foul world, and when she told her children tales of the villainies they could understand, it was not to corrupt them, but because, for her, the world was really so.
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Good digestion is for the bovine.
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It's immoral to work to make money. There's something unlucky in it. You got to work for the work. You got to work on a farm, for the farm - then it makes money.
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Henny “was one of those women who secretly symphathize with all women against all men; life was a rotten deal, with men holding all the aces.
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I do not know how I got through without breaking down, without my heart bursting from sorrow and shame.
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Each Australian is a Ulysses.
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Men are always good to fools and perfect idiots,” cried Henny impatiently. “A man will run ten miles from a woman with sense.
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No rich man is a patriot, no rich man is a friend. They have all only got one fatherland the Ritz-Carlton; and one friend the mistress they're promising to divorce their wives for.
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Instead, she looked vaguely about, sniffing that familiar smell of fresh dirtiness which belongs to mankind’s extreme youth, a pleasant smell to mothers. Henny had spent twelve years in that atmosphere.
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Wait till you’ve washed and scrubbed for a man for ten or twelve years.