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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.
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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When a woman hates, she will wreck a dozen lives to pay back what she conceives to be some injury.
Christina Stead -
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.
Christina Stead -
If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves, there wouldn't be enough to go around.
Christina Stead -
Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimistic
Christina Stead -
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.”
Christina Stead -
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.
Christina Stead
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Who tarnishes, assaults, threatens, hates the spirit of man is guilty of crime.
Christina Stead -
When he was away she could stand him, and the farther he was away the more she could stand him!
Christina Stead -
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.
Christina Stead -
All the best gods are made of stone and say nothing.
Christina Stead -
I know,” he said with sudden bitterness, “because your mother’s game is working after all. She is turning you against me.” “No,” said Louie. He looked at her pityingly, “No, I know you don’t know it, Looloo.
Christina Stead -
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.
Christina Stead
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Loneliness is a terrible blindness.
Christina Stead -
Old age is perhaps life's decision about us ...
Christina Stead -
She said she hated my children - her own children, Looloo-dirl, her own children!
Christina Stead -
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.
Christina Stead -
About the girls she only thought of marriage, and about marriage she thought as an ignorant, dissatisfied, but helpless slave did of slavery.
Christina Stead -
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?
Christina Stead
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And the three women, after crying, felt united in a love.
Christina Stead -
For all education is outside, not inside, the schoolroom.
Christina Stead -
They never asked any reasons for their parents’ fights, thinking all adults unreasonable, violent beings, the toys of their own monstrous tempers and egotisms
Christina Stead -
Of course, the morning, every morning, was full of such incidents. That was family life. They were all able to get through the day without receiving any particular wounds; every such thing left its tiny scar, but their infant skins healed with wonderful quickness.
Christina Stead