Christina Stead Quotes
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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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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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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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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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Money goes where money is, money yearns where money is.
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Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.
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It was only much later that I found out hardness worked better than love.
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It is women who must clean up the mess men make, the mess everything makes
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Good digestion is for the bovine.
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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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Sam,' said Saul fervently, 'when you talk, you know you create a world.
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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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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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Wait till you’ve washed and scrubbed for a man for ten or twelve years.
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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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A single girl must lead a double life don't you think?
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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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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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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.”
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I do not know how I got through without breaking down, without my heart bursting from sorrow and shame.