Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Christina Stead - Page 2

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

A dominant race did not lie, because it had the whip.

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.

Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life.

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.

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

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

Strange is the influence of Marx on character.

If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers.

It is most oppressive to be an aunt.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A tory youth is a youth speculating on his future.