Quotes from Christina Stead

The white man in the tropics degenerates every day.

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.

Men never believe a woman can do anything.

It's fine to be a great democrat when you've a slave to rub your boots on.

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.

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.

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.

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

Money has no country.

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.

Philosophy is by the timid for the timid.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Old age is perhaps life's decision about us.

Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life.

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

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

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