Quotes from Christina Stead

Intuition is not infallible; it only seems to be the truth. It is a message which we may interpret wrongly.

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

Love is feared: it dissolves society, it's unpopular, and it's very rare.

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.

Charm is a cunning self-forgetfulness.

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.

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

Give me your honest opinion. I don't want truth with a veil on—I like naked ladies naked.

It is splendid—to be—loved! If we only—can—live up—to the thoughts—of us—by them—that love us!

Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that. Why was I ever born?

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.

What a dreary stodgy world of adults the children saw when they went out!

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

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

If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn't be enough to go around.

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

All the June Saturday afternoon Sam Pollit's children were on the lookout for him as they skated round the dirt sidewalks and seamed old asphalt of R Street and Reservoir Road that bounded the deep-grassed acres of Tohoga House, their home.

Tolstoy said that "each unhappy family is unhappy in a way of its own—

Whatever men say, women know;

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.

men call it the tyranny of tears, it is an iron tyranny- no man could be so cruel, so devishlish,as a woman with her weakness, recrimination, convenient ailments, nerves and tears. We men are all weak as water before the primitive devices of Eve. I was patient at first, many years. '

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.

The sensuality, delicacy of literature does not exist for me; only the passion, energy and struggle… Most of my friends deplore this: they are always telling me what I should leave out in order to have success. But I know that nothing has more success in the end than an intelligent ferocity.

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.