Christina Stead Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

Venus can see at night without eyes.

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.

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.

About myself - no. I'm unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.

Loneliness is a terrible blindness.

Charm is a cunning self-forgetfulness.

Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.

Each Australian is a Ulysses.

Money goes where money is, money yearns where money is.

Radicalism is the opium of the middle class.

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

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

Money has no country.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

A lie is real; it aims at success. A liar is a realist.

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?

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 more we know, the better our intuitions.

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.

Old age and youth cannot live together.

Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life.

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

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.

A single girl must lead a double life don't you think?

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

Old age is perhaps life's decision about us.

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

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

Strange is the influence of Marx on character.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

Philosophy is by the timid for the timid.

It is most oppressive to be an aunt.

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

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.

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.