Top 80 Christina Stead Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I hate Bernard Shaw because he says that life is compromise.”

— Christina Stead

52. “It’s fine to be a great democrat when you’ve a slave to rub your boots on.”

— Christina Stead

53. “Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.”

— Christina Stead

54. “It is splendid – to be – loved! If we only – can – live up – to the thoughts – of us – by them – that love us!”

— Christina Stead

55. “Each Australian is a Ulysses.”

— Christina Stead

56. “If misery spelled revolt, we should have had nothing but revolt from the beginning of time. On the contrary, it is quite rare.”

— Christina Stead

57. “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

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

— Christina Stead

59. “Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimistic.”

— Christina Stead

60. “I love you, I love men and women, I love little children and all innocent things, I love, I feel I am love itself – how could I pick out a woman who would hate me so much!”

— Christina Stead

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

— Christina Stead

62. “He talks about human equality, the rights of man, nothing but that. How about the rights of woman, I’d like to scream at him. It’s fine to be a great democrat when you’ve a slave to rub your boots on.”

— Christina Stead

63. “Her poverty was naked on the empty streets, and if no one walked abroad she felt all the more ghastly, like a wretched sinner in the sight of God.”

— Christina Stead

64. “A mother! What are we worth really? They all grow up whether you look after them or not.”

— Christina Stead

65. “In our early days she went with me to the eugenics meetings, but that period soon ended.”

— Christina Stead

66. “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

67. “I do not know how I got through without breaking down, without my heart bursting from sorrow and shame.”

— Christina Stead

68. “Philosophy is by the timid for the timid.”

— Christina Stead

69. “Henny was beautifully, wholeheartedly vile: she asked no quarter and gave none to the foul world, and when she told her children tales of the villainies they could understand, it was not to corrupt them, but because, for her, the world was really so.”

— Christina Stead

70. “I shall never be a dangerous woman; I can make men love, but I cannot make them suffer. It would be much better the other way about. I have seen women able to make men suffer who could not make them love. The more they suffered the more they hung around for a showdown. In the end they did better than I, for it is strange what people will do to be able to suffer and say to themselves, in the night, “I have suffered, I have lived indeed.”

— Christina Stead

71. “Whatever men say, women know;.”

— Christina Stead

72. “By smiling, we turn devils into angels, enemies into friends; the cup of poison becomes the loving cup.”

— Christina Stead

73. “Behind the concept of woman’s strangeness is the idea that a woman may do anything: she is below society, not bound by its law, unpredictable; an attribute given to every member of the league of the unfortunate.”

— Christina Stead

74. “Hair under the arms, for example, he said, should never be removed, for nature had put it there, and evidently it had some use. She had suddenly said, “You have too many children, Mr. Pollit.”

— Christina Stead

75. “The more we know, the better our intuitions.”

— Christina Stead

76. “Where, in all the self-righteous lying world, could she turn for a friend? She even thought angrily of her children – they were simply eating up her flesh as they had when they were at the breast, no less.”

— Christina Stead

77. “When we are born, we are studied, and deviations, if noxious to the species, are suppressed; good deviations are preserved. And furthermore, we bear our formula on our arm band!”

— Christina Stead

78. “Strange is the influence of Marx on character.”

— Christina Stead

79. “What a dreary stodgy world of adults the children saw when they went out!”

— Christina Stead

80. “Sam faced something he had never conceived of in all his life – the triumph of calumny.”

— Christina Stead

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

— Christina Stead

82. “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

83. “The French are a tremendously verbal race: they kill you with their assurances, their repetitions, their reasons, their platitudes, their formulae, their propositions, their solutions.”

— Christina Stead

84. “Old age is perhaps life’s decision about us...”

— Christina Stead

85. “Anyone would think a thin stick like me, weak and miserable would go down with everything: do you think I get more than my 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

86. “Of course, the morning, every morning, was full of such incidents. That was family life. They were all able to get through the day without receiving any particular wounds; every such thing left its tiny scar, but their infant skins healed with wonderful quickness.”

— Christina Stead