Christina Stead Quotes
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Good digestion is for the bovine.
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She is never more herself than when she destroys herself.
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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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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.
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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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Each Australian is a Ulysses.
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Tolstoy said that “each unhappy family is unhappy in a way of its own
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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 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?
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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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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.
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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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What a dreary stodgy world of adults the children saw when they went out!
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All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.
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The light of the years to come, to me; and the law would give them into your charge because you are their mother, no matter what kind of a woman you are.
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A mother! What are we worth really? They all grow up whether you look after them or not.
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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.
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She knows that soon she will have escaped into the world of the people better than us, the great objective world better than Shakespeare and Beethoven and Donatello put together—didn’t they all come out of it?
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About the girls she only thought of marriage, and about marriage she thought as an ignorant, dissatisfied, but helpless slave did of slavery.
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If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves, there wouldn't be enough to go around.
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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
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Loneliness is a terrible blindness.
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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.”
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I saw my entire life a waste, a desert of shame and unspeakable sorrow, and behind me, a suicided wife!