Christina stead quotes

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.

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.

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

The great white city of brotherhood, Washington.

A woman is a hunter without a forest.

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.

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

The sensuality, delicacy of literature does not exist for me; only the passion, energy and struggle… Most of my friends deplore this: they are always telling me what I should leave out in order to have success. But I know that nothing has more success in the end than an intelligent ferocity.

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.

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

A tory youth is a youth speculating on his future.

Charm is a cunning self-forgetfulness.

There are so may ways to kills yourself, they're just old-fashioned with their permanganate: do you think I'd take permanganate? I wouldn't want to burn my insides out and live to tell the tale as well: idiots! It's simple, I'd drown myself... Why be in misery at the last?

Philosophy is by the timid for the timid.

The more we know, the better our intuitions.

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.

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

Why is it every careerist tries to turn his mother into a Madonna--to prove his intellect is a virgin birth, papa had nothing to do with it? It's the sign of the misogynist.

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.

It's easy to make money. You put up the sign Bank and someone walks in and hands you his money. The façade is everything.

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?

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

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.

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.

Each Australian is a Ulysses.

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

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.

Pukka sahib or rank outsider--gentleman or bounder--and it's accent, accent, all the way.

If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves, there wouldn't be enough to go around.

A lie is real; it aims at success. A liar is a realist.

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

Anyone would think a thin stick like me, weak and miserable, would go down with everything: do you think I get more than my old cough every winter? I bet I live till ninety, with all my aches and pains. To think that's fifty more years of the Great-I-Am.

A single girl must lead a double life don't you think?

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.

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.

Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life.

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

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?

Strange is the influence of Marx on character.

Weak, tea-drinking, effeminate, ineffectual--masters of India, robbers of South Africa, bedevillers of all Europe.

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.

I never wanted to marry anyone like my father; I always preferred those more shoddy.

Money has no country.

It is most oppressive to be an aunt.

Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.

Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.

It's fine to be a great democrat when you've a slave to rub your boots on.

The white man in the tropics degenerates every day.

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

Men never believe a woman can do anything.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Love is feared: it dissolves society, it's unpopular, and it's very rare.

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

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

Radicalism is the opium of the middle class.

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

We are primitive men; we taboo what we desire and need. How did the denying of love come to be associated with the idea of morality.

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

Loneliness is a terrible blindness.

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.

Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimistic

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.

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

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

It was easy to see how upsetting it would be if women began to love freely where love came to them. An abyss would open in the principal shopping street of every town.

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

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

Old age is perhaps life's decision about us.

Venus can see at night without eyes.

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

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

Old age and youth cannot live together.

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.

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.

It is a rule of creative ability that it does nothing of any value, while it is possessed by this afflatus of vanity.

Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.