Christina Stead Quotes
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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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God, what we women have to put up with; and I’m not even allowed to complain.
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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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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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Each Australian is a Ulysses.
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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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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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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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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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What a dreary stodgy world of adults the children saw when they went out!
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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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Tolstoy said that “each unhappy family is unhappy in a way of its own
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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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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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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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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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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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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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I saw my entire life a waste, a desert of shame and unspeakable sorrow, and behind me, a suicided wife!