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.
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.
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
Intuition is not infallible; it only seems to be the truth. It is a message which we may interpret wrongly.
It is a rule of creative ability that it does nothing of any value, while it is possessed by this afflatus of vanity.
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 know your breed; all your fine officials debauch the younger girls who are afraid to lose their jobs: that's as old as Washington.
All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.
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.
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.
Pukka sahib or rank outsider--gentleman or bounder--and it's accent, accent, all the way.
Humorists are always pessimists. They're reactionaries: because they see that every golden cloud has a black lining.
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.
If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers.
I wish I had a man and not a dishrag printed over with big words like 'constitutional rights' and 'progress'!
Weak, tea-drinking, effeminate, ineffectual--masters of India, robbers of South Africa, bedevillers of all Europe.
We are primitive men; we taboo what we desire and need. How did the denying of love come to be associated with the idea of morality.
Women are outside the law; they make nothing, they say yes or no to some collections of whereases.
I never wanted to marry anyone like my father; I always preferred those more shoddy.
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.
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.
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.
