Christina Stead Quotes
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A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.
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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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Money goes where money is, money yearns where money is.
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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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It was only much later that I found out hardness worked better than love.
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Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.
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They were all eccentric, touched, ill-intentioned, ignorant, superstitious, avaricious, or full members of nitwitry.
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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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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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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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God, what we women have to put up with; and I’m not even allowed to complain.
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It is women who must clean up the mess men make, the mess everything makes
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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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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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Why doesn’t he drop down dead? Was he sent by God to worry women?
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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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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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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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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.
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The world would not let him rave, this was the great injustice he suffered from: he stalked up and down being angry, in futility;
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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.