Quotes from Christina Stead

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!

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.

she had no money, and she had to live with a man who fancied himself a public character and a moralist of a very saintly type. The moralist said mice brought germs and so she was obliged to chase the mouse and all its fellow guests. Nevertheless, although she despised animals, she felt involuntarily that the little marauder was much like herself, trying to get by: she belongs to the great race of human beings who regard life as a series of piracies of all powers.

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

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.

she saw her husband for the first time: she had married a child whose only talent was an air of engaging helplessness by which he got the protection of certain goodhearted people—

she belonged to the great race of human beings who regard life as a series of piracies of all powers.

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.

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

Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.

Loneliness is a terrible blindness.

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 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!

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.

Sam faced something he had never conceived of in all his life—the triumph of calumny.

it was the rotten fabric woven by evil, the overnight sham bulwarks of enemies of the people; it would burn to ash at the match of truth.

Good digestion is for the bovine.

Tell Papa I'm a communist, but a bad communist. I use a lipstick made by a Russian noble, Prince Matchabelli. (It sounds Italian though.).

Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us—" or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.

you do not know what she did not only to me but to the little children. She has tortured them, turned them against me, lied to them

she is never more herself than when she destroys herself.

She said she hated my children—her own children, Looloo-dirl, her own children!

He wanted to be angry, his mission was was to be angry, and he had nothing to be angry about; the world would not let him rave, this was the great injustice he suffered from.

I'm afraid to write to your father: he criticizes my spelling," sneered Henny. "And it appears I know nothing about geography. Hang his stuck-up conceit.