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Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that. Why was I ever born?
Christina Stead -
About myself - no. I'm unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.
Christina Stead
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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.
Christina Stead -
A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.
Christina Stead -
They were all eccentric, touched, ill-intentioned, ignorant, superstitious, avaricious, or full members of nitwitry.
Christina Stead -
To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with.
Christina Stead -
It was only much later that I found out hardness worked better than love.
Christina Stead -
I do not know how I got through without breaking down, without my heart bursting from sorrow and shame.
Christina Stead
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God, what we women have to put up with; and I’m not even allowed to complain.
Christina Stead -
Wait till you’ve washed and scrubbed for a man for ten or twelve years.
Christina Stead -
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?
Christina Stead -
It is women who must clean up the mess men make, the mess everything makes
Christina Stead -
Why doesn’t he drop down dead? Was he sent by God to worry women?
Christina Stead -
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.
Christina Stead
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Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.
Christina Stead -
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.
Christina Stead -
A single girl must lead a double life don't you think?
Christina Stead -
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.
Christina Stead -
The world would not let him rave, this was the great injustice he suffered from: he stalked up and down being angry, in futility;
Christina Stead -
And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog!
Christina Stead
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You will never break up my home. I know that’s been your object for years and the aim of all your secret maneuvers. I love my children as no man ever loved his before. I know men love their children, but mine are bound up in me, part of me.
Christina Stead -
She saw her husband for the first time: she had married a child whose only talent was an air of engaging helplessness by which he got the protection of certain goodhearted people
Christina Stead -
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.
Christina Stead -
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!
Christina Stead