Christina Stead Quotes

Loneliness is a terrible blindness.

I wish I had a man and not a dishrag printed over with big words like 'constitutional rights' and 'progress'!

Ye want to tell the plain truth all your life, woman, and speak straight; otherwise ye get to seeing double.

All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.

A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.

Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.

Financiers are great mythomaniacs, their explanations and superstitions are those of primitive men; the world is a jungle to them.They perceive acutely that they are at the dawn of economic history.

If misery spelled revolt, we should have had nothing but revolt from the beginning of time. On the contrary, it is quite rare.

You want to be free and break new ground, speak your mind, fear no man, have the neighbours acknowledge that you're a good man; and at the same time you want to be a success, make money, join the country club, get the votes and kick the other man in the teeth and off the ladder.

I know your breed; all your fine officials debauch the younger girls who are afraid to lose their jobs: that's as old as Washington.

Humorists are always pessimists. They're reactionaries: because they see that every golden cloud has a black lining.

Intuition is not infallible; it only seems to be the truth. It is a message which we may interpret wrongly.

There'll be no sense in sexual theories until women start telling their minds; and, of course, until they have some.

Men never believe a woman can do anything.

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?

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.

A mother! What are we worth really? They all grow up whether you look after them or not.

No rich man is a patriot, no rich man is a friend. They have all only got one fatherland the Ritz-Carlton; and one friend the mistress they're promising to divorce their wives for.

To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with.

Each Australian is a Ulysses.

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.

A tory youth is a youth speculating on his future.

A bank is a confidence trick. If you put up the right signs, the wizards of finance themselves will come in and ask you to take their money.

About myself - no. I'm unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.

The City is a machine miraculously organised for extracting gold from the seas, airs, clouds, from barren lands, holds of ships, mines, plantations, cottage hearth-stones, trees and rocks; and he, wretchedly waiting in the exterior halls, could not even get his finger on one tiny, tiny lever.

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.

A speculator is a man who, if he dies at the right time, has a rich widow.

Socialist writers are made of sterner stuff than those who only let their characters steeplechase through trouble in order to comeout first in the happy ending of moral uplift.

Behind the concept of woman's strangeness is the idea that a woman may do anything: she is below society, not bound by its law, unpredictable; an attribute given to every member of the league of the unfortunate.

I do not want to go to heaven; I want my children, forever children, and other children, stalwart adults, and a good happy wife, that is all I ask, but not paradise; earth is good enough for me: it is because I believe earth is heaven, Naden, that I can overcome all my troubles and face down my enemies.

If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers.

Philosophy is by the timid for the timid.

Women are outside the law; they make nothing, they say yes or no to some collections of whereases.

A dominant race did not lie, because it had the whip.

Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that.

I hate Bernard Shaw because he says that life is compromise.

People who don't like scandals shouldn't be in finance.

I don't know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.

Money has no country.

All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.

The French are a tremendously verbal race: they kill you with their assurances, their repetitions, their reasons, their platitudes, their formulae, their propositions, their solutions.

Women have been brought up much like slaves, that is, to lie.

And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog!

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.

Money goes where money is, money yearns where money is.

Every work of art should give utterance, or indicate, the awful blind strength and the cruelty of the creative impulse, that is why they must all have what are called errors, both of taste and style.

The more we know, the better our intuitions.

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.