Christina Stead Quotes

Give me your honest opinion. I don't want truth with a veil on - I like naked ladies naked.

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

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

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.

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.

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 is most oppressive to be an aunt.

Old age and youth cannot live together.

Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that. Why was I ever born?

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.

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

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

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.

Tell Papa I'm a communist, but a bad communist. I use a lipstick made by a Russian noble, Prince Matchabelli. (It sounds Italian though.).

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.

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

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

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.

Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.

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.

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

Venus can see at night without eyes.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

Philosophy is by the timid for the timid.

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.

Old age is perhaps life's decision about us ...

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.

Charm is a cunning self-forgetfulness.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

A tory youth is a youth speculating on his future.

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

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

The white man in the tropics degenerates every day.

Each Australian is a Ulysses.

Strange is the influence of Marx on character.

Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father's head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the dayshine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him.

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.