Top 80 Christina Stead Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Christina Stead

2. “Money goes where money is, money yearns where money is.”

— Christina Stead

3. “People who don’t like scandals shouldn’t be in finance.”

— Christina Stead

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

— Christina Stead

5. “About myself – no. I’m unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.”

— Christina Stead

6. “If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers.”

— Christina Stead

7. “Radicalism is the opium of the middle class.”

— Christina Stead

8. “Loneliness is a terrible blindness.”

— Christina Stead

9. “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

10. “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

11. “Venus can see at night without eyes.”

— Christina Stead

12. “A single girl must lead a double life don’t you think?”

— Christina Stead

13. “Love is feared: it dissolves society, it’s unpopular, and it’s very rare.”

— Christina Stead

14. “Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.”

— Christina Stead

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

— Christina Stead

16. “Pukka sahib or rank outsider – gentleman or bounder – and it’s accent, accent, all the way.”

— 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. “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

19. “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.”

— Christina Stead

20. “Money has no country.”

— Christina Stead

21. “It is most oppressive to be an aunt.”

— Christina Stead

22. “And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog!”

— Christina Stead

23. “Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that.”

— Christina Stead

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

— Christina Stead

25. “Men never believe a woman can do anything.”

— Christina Stead

26. “A tory youth is a youth speculating on his future.”

— Christina Stead

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

— Christina Stead

28. “Charm is a cunning self-forgetfulness.”

— Christina Stead

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Good digestion is for the bovine.”

— Christina Stead

32. “Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.”

— Christina Stead

33. “The white man in the tropics degenerates every day.”

— Christina Stead

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

— Christina Stead

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

— Christina Stead

36. “Weak, tea-drinking, effeminate, ineffectual – masters of India, robbers of South Africa, bedevillers of all Europe.”

— Christina Stead

37. “Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life.”

— Christina Stead

38. “I never wanted to marry anyone like my father; I always preferred those more shoddy.”

— Christina Stead

39. “Old age and youth cannot live together.”

— Christina Stead

40. “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

41. “Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father’s head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the dayshine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him.”

— Christina Stead

42. “Women are outside the law; they make nothing, they say yes or no to some collections of whereases.”

— Christina Stead

43. “Who tarnishes, assaults, threatens, hates the spirit of man is guilty of crime.”

— Christina Stead

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “I don’t know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.”

— Christina Stead

48. “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.”

— Christina Stead

49. “Tolstoy said that “each unhappy family is unhappy in a way of its own –.”

— Christina Stead

50. “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