Christina Stead Quotes
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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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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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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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Sam,' said Saul fervently, 'when you talk, you know you create a world.
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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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And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog!
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"Nothing hurts me if I don’t want it to,” she told him.
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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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They were all eccentric, touched, ill-intentioned, ignorant, superstitious, avaricious, or full members of nitwitry.
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Money goes where money is, money yearns where money is.
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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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Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.
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Wait till you’ve washed and scrubbed for a man for ten or twelve years.
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It was only much later that I found out hardness worked better than love.
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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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When we are born, we are studied, and deviations, if noxious to the species, are suppressed; good deviations are preserved. And furthermore, we bear our formula on our arm band!
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They never asked any reasons for their parents’ fights, thinking all adults unreasonable, violent beings, the toys of their own monstrous tempers and egotisms
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Why doesn’t he drop down dead? Was he sent by God to worry women?
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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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A single girl must lead a double life don't you think?
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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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It is women who must clean up the mess men make, the mess everything makes
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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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A woman can't be, until a girl dies. . . . I mean the sprites that girls are, so different from us, all their fancies, their illusions, their flower world, the dreams they live in.”