Christina Stead Quotes

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

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.

Radicalism is the opium of the middle class.

A woman is a hunter without a forest.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Money has no country.

Charm is a cunning self-forgetfulness.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.

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 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.

Old age is perhaps life's decision about us.

The white man in the tropics degenerates every day.

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