1.
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.
Christina Stead
2.
If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves, there wouldn't be enough to go around.
Christina Stead
3.
A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford.
Christina Stead
4.
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
5.
Venus can see at night without eyes.
Christina Stead
6.
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
7.
Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimistic
Christina Stead
8.
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
9.
About myself - no. I'm unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.
Christina Stead
10.
Loneliness is a terrible blindness.
Christina Stead
11.
Charm is a cunning self-forgetfulness.
Christina Stead
12.
Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.
Christina Stead
13.
Each Australian is a Ulysses.
Christina Stead
14.
Money goes where money is, money yearns where money is.
Christina Stead
15.
Radicalism is the opium of the middle class.
Christina Stead
16.
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
17.
Intuition is not infallible; it only seems to be the truth. It is a message which we may interpret wrongly.
Christina Stead
18.
Money has no country.
Christina Stead
19.
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.
Christina Stead
20.
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.
Christina Stead
21.
I don't know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.
Christina Stead
22.
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
23.
All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.
Christina Stead
24.
A lie is real; it aims at success. A liar is a realist.
Christina Stead
25.
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?
Christina Stead
26.
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
27.
The more we know, the better our intuitions.
Christina Stead
28.
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
29.
Old age and youth cannot live together.
Christina Stead
30.
Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life.
Christina Stead
31.
A speculator is a man who, if he dies at the right time, has a rich widow.
Christina Stead
32.
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
33.
A single girl must lead a double life don't you think?
Christina Stead
34.
A dominant race did not lie, because it had the whip.
Christina Stead
35.
Old age is perhaps life's decision about us.
Christina Stead
36.
Humorists are always pessimists. They're reactionaries: because they see that every golden cloud has a black lining.
Christina Stead
37.
There'll be no sense in sexual theories until women start telling their minds; and, of course, until they have some.
Christina Stead
38.
Strange is the influence of Marx on character.
Christina Stead
39.
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
40.
Women have been brought up much like slaves, that is, to lie.
Christina Stead
41.
Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that.
Christina Stead
42.
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?
Christina Stead
43.
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
44.
I hate Bernard Shaw because he says that life is compromise.
Christina Stead
45.
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.
Christina Stead
46.
Philosophy is by the timid for the timid.
Christina Stead
47.
It is most oppressive to be an aunt.
Christina Stead
48.
I wish I had a man and not a dishrag printed over with big words like 'constitutional rights' and 'progress'!
Christina Stead
49.
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
50.
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
