Christina Stead Quotes
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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?
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Money has no country.
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The white man in the tropics degenerates every day.
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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?
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A lie is real; it aims at success. A liar is a realist.
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Pukka sahib or rank outsider--gentleman or bounder--and it's accent, accent, all the way.
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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.
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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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Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that.
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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.
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And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog!
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Radicalism is the opium of the middle class.
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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.
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Old age is perhaps life's decision about us.
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Women have been brought up much like slaves, that is, to lie.
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About myself - no. I'm unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.
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Women are outside the law; they make nothing, they say yes or no to some collections of whereases.
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It's fine to be a great democrat when you've a slave to rub your boots on.
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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.
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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.
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It is most oppressive to be an aunt.
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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.
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Ye want to tell the plain truth all your life, woman, and speak straight; otherwise ye get to seeing double.
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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.
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Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.
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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.
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Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.
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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.
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There'll be no sense in sexual theories until women start telling their minds; and, of course, until they have some.
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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.
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