Christina Stead Quotes
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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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Sam,' said Saul fervently, 'when you talk, you know you create a world.
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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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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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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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"Nothing hurts me if I don’t want it to,” she told him.
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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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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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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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A single girl must lead a double life don't you think?
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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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It is women who must clean up the mess men make, the mess everything makes
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They were all eccentric, touched, ill-intentioned, ignorant, superstitious, avaricious, or full members of nitwitry.
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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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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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Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.
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And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog!
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A mother! What are we worth really? They all grow up whether you look after them or not. That poor miserable brat of his is growing up, and I certainly licked the hide off her; and she's seen marriage at its worst, and now she's dreaming about 'supermen' and 'great men'. What is the good of doing anything for them?
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God, what we women have to put up with; and I’m not even allowed to complain.
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Money goes where money is, money yearns where money is.
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Each Australian is a Ulysses.