Christina Stead Quotes
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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.
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Old age is perhaps life's decision about us ...
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A woman can't be, until a girl dies. . . . I mean the sprites that girls are, so different from us, all their fancies, their illusions, their flower world, the dreams they live in.”
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She was able to feel active creation going on around her in the rocks and hills, where the mystery of lust took place; and in herself, where all was yet only the night of senses and wild dreams, the work of passion going on.
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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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And the three women, after crying, felt united in a love.
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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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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 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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He talks about human equality, the rights of man, nothing but that. How about the rights of woman, I’d like to scream at him. It’s fine to be a great democrat when you’ve a slave to rub your boots on.
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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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Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimistic
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When he was away she could stand him, and the farther he was away the more she could stand him!
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Loneliness is a terrible blindness.
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Perhaps I have made a mistake, but Heaven knows I have been faithful to my marriage vows.” She chuckled, “The more fool you!
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You see when a man knows he will be old, he is afraid: when he becomes old, he cares for nothing - love does not count, only comfort; honor does not count, only cheating for a niche.
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All the best gods are made of stone and say nothing.
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All men are dogs
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When a woman hates, she will wreck a dozen lives to pay back what she conceives to be some injury.
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I will never let the vestal fire go out in my innermost recesses’: people feel that vestal fire and they feel that its possessor is sacred: they will not harm him. He walks unharmed amongst people reputed savage because they honor what is most good in man.
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Who tarnishes, assaults, threatens, hates the spirit of man is guilty of crime.
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When people are collecting gold they aren't doing business. ... Gold is constipation: even bankruptcy is more fluid. Gold isn't wealth: positions in markets are wealth.
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She soon reached a point when she could not sit at the table with him and listen to his misbegotten notions and morality with its mistaken examples.
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Hair under the arms, for example, he said, should never be removed, for nature had put it there, and evidently it had some use. She had suddenly said, “You have too many children, Mr. Pollit.