Christina Stead Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

Intuition is not infallible; it only seems to be the truth. It is a message which we may interpret wrongly.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
Sell, he can. He can sell last week's bait for tomorrow's halibut.

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

Christina Stead
It is a rule of creative ability that it does nothing of any value, while it is possessed by this afflatus of vanity.

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

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

Christina Stead
Women have been brought up much like slaves, that is, to lie.

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

Christina Stead
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.

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

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
You were trained to live in a society which doesn't exist, because no society is the same between yesterday and tomorrow.

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

Christina Stead
All your fine officials debauch the young girls who are afraid to lose their jobs: that's as old as Washington.

Christina Stead
He could not read more than a few consecutive sentences in any book or newspaper unless they referred immediately to himself or his interests.

Christina Stead
I wouldn't mind being your partner if there were two of me.

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

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

Christina Stead
Anyone would think a thin stick like me, weak and miserable would go down with everything: do you think I get more than my 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.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn't be enough to go round.

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

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

Christina Stead