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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.
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
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Good digestion is for the bovine.
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 -
What a dreary stodgy world of adults the children saw when they went out!
Christina Stead -
Sam,' said Saul fervently, 'when you talk, you know you create a world.
Christina Stead -
The waste, the insane freaks of these money men, the cynicism and egotism of their life... I'll show that they are not brilliant, not romantic, not delightful, not intelligent.
Christina Stead -
"Nothing hurts me if I don’t want it to,” she told him.
Christina Stead
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Don’t call humans rats - rats are superior.
Christina Stead -
Each Australian is a Ulysses.
Christina Stead -
She is never more herself than when she destroys herself.
Christina Stead -
I’m an old woman, your mother’s an old woman, so I’ll be an old woman, and I’ll do what I please.
Christina Stead -
Where, in all the self-righteous lying world, could she turn for a friend? She even thought angrily of her children - they were simply eating up her flesh as they had when they were at the breast, no less.
Christina Stead -
She said, her children should not live on trash, her children had to fight for their livings, having such a silly, puffed-up ignoramus of a father, her girls were not going to be underfed “mud rats.”
Christina Stead
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The children hid themselves, with receptive ears, round corners.
Christina Stead -
I saw my entire life a waste, a desert of shame and unspeakable sorrow, and behind me, a suicided wife!
Christina Stead -
All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.
Christina Stead -
Money that is in billions and monopolies isn't money at all, because the people have none, and money is democratic, everyone has to have some or there's none at all.
Christina Stead -
I love you, I love men and women, I love little children and all innocent things, I love, I feel I am love itself - how could I pick out a woman who would hate me so much!
Christina Stead -
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?
Christina Stead
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Tolstoy said that “each unhappy family is unhappy in a way of its own
Christina Stead -
The Chinese are a knowing people; and I daresay that is why they once made a religious odor about old age; to prevent their sons from seeing their own future.
Christina Stead -
A mother! What are we worth really? They all grow up whether you look after them or not.
Christina Stead -
Our old age is perhaps life’s decision about us - or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.
Christina Stead