Christina Stead Quotes
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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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A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.
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And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog!
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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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They were all eccentric, touched, ill-intentioned, ignorant, superstitious, avaricious, or full members of nitwitry.
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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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Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.
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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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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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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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I do not know how I got through without breaking down, without my heart bursting from sorrow and shame.
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Why doesn’t he drop down dead? Was he sent by God to worry women?
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"Nothing hurts me if I don’t want it to,” she told him.
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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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Good digestion is for the bovine.
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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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Wait till you’ve washed and scrubbed for a man for ten or twelve years.
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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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A single girl must lead a double life don't you think?
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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.