Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Christina Stead
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Australian novelist Christina Stead.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
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?
The great white city of brotherhood, Washington.
A lie is real; it aims at success. A liar is a realist.
Each Australian is a Ulysses.
A mother! What are we worth really? They all grow up whether you look after them or not.
Radicalism is the opium of the middle class.
Loneliness is a terrible blindness.
About myself - no. I'm unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.
If misery spelled revolt, we should have had nothing but revolt from the beginning of time. On the contrary, it is quite rare.
The more we know, the better our intuitions.
Money has no country.
It is a rule of creative ability that it does nothing of any value, while it is possessed by this afflatus of vanity.
There'll be no sense in sexual theories until women start telling their minds; and, of course, until they have some.
Humorists are always pessimists. They're reactionaries: because they see that every golden cloud has a black lining.
A speculator is a man who, if he dies at the right time, has a rich widow.
The white man in the tropics degenerates every day.
A single girl must lead a double life don't you think?
A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.
All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.
Love is feared: it dissolves society, it's unpopular, and it's very rare.
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.
It's fine to be a great democrat when you've a slave to rub your boots on.
Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.
Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimistic
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.
If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves, there wouldn't be enough to go around.
Ye want to tell the plain truth all your life, woman, and speak straight; otherwise ye get to seeing double.
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 don't know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.
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?
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.
Venus can see at night without eyes.
Old age is perhaps life's decision about us.
Old age and youth cannot live together.
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.
Pukka sahib or rank outsider--gentleman or bounder--and it's accent, accent, all the way.
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.
Charm is a cunning self-forgetfulness.
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.
Money goes where money is, money yearns where money is.
Men never believe a woman can do anything.
I wish I had a man and not a dishrag printed over with big words like 'constitutional rights' and 'progress'!
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.
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 woman is a hunter without a forest.
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?
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.
Philosophy is by the timid for the timid.
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.
Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.
People who don't like scandals shouldn't be in finance.
Women have been brought up much like slaves, that is, to lie.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Intuition is not infallible; it only seems to be the truth. It is a message which we may interpret wrongly.
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.
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.
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.
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