Christina Stead Quotes about Art

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.

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

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.

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

Loneliness is a terrible blindness.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.