Christina Stead Quotes - Page 3

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.

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

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

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

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

Men never believe a woman can do anything.

Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life.

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.

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

It is most oppressive to be an aunt.

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

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

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.

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.

Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.

Strange is the influence of Marx on character.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

A tory youth is a youth speculating on his future.

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