Christina Stead Quotes
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"Nothing hurts me if I don’t want it to,” she told him.
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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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She is never more herself than when she destroys herself.
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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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God, what we women have to put up with; and I’m not even allowed to complain.
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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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Each Australian is a Ulysses.
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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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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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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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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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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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What a dreary stodgy world of adults the children saw when they went out!
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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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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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All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.
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Tolstoy said that “each unhappy family is unhappy in a way of its own
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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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Money is a jealous mistress If you want money you must want only money. ... I must tell you the one secret of life, there is only one: everything is a jealous mistress, everything is terribly possessive, and, by God, we want to be terribly possessed if we want to get somewhere - and we want to be terribly possessed - anyhow; or what is life?
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They never asked any reasons for their parents’ fights, thinking all adults unreasonable, violent beings, the toys of their own monstrous tempers and egotisms
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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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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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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.
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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.