Christina Stead Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

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

Christina Stead
Other countries have history; we have nothing but contradictions.

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

Christina Stead
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.

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

Christina Stead
There'll be no sense in sexual theories until women start telling their minds; and, of course, until they have some.

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

Christina Stead
A mother! What are we worth really? They all grow up whether you look after them or not.

Christina Stead
A speculator is a man who, if he dies at the right time, has a rich widow.

Christina Stead
She had the tough slangy local manner, the local obscenities, the curious American relative pronouns: what-the hell, why-the-hell, where-the-hell, who-the-hell, how-the-hell were the only ones she used.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
Socialist writers are made of sterner stuff than those who only let their characters steeplechase through trouble in order to come out first in the happy ending of moral uplift.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree — just good for cutting up and building your house with.

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

Christina Stead
Why, if all the rich men in the world divided up their money amongst themselves, there wouldn't be enough to go round.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
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?

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

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead
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.

Christina Stead