Quotes from Christina Stead

Wait till you've washed and scrubbed for a man for ten or twelve years.

Why doesn't he drop down dead? Was he sent by God to worry women?

For all education is outside, not inside, the schoolroom.

Don't call humans rats—rats are superior.

The entire gamut of scandal, hate, and lying is prepared for a poor man in this world who dares to work for the truth. That is why they got rid of me too: they feared me, for wickedness fears Truth.

Nothing hurts me if I don't want it to," she told him.

They never asked any reasons for their parents' fights, thinking all adults unreasonable, violent beings, the toys of their own monstrous tempers and egotisms

Henny "was one of those women who secretly symphathize with all women against all men; life was a rotten deal, with men holding all the aces.

It is women who must clean up the mess men make, the mess everything makes:

Henny was one of those women who secretly sympathize with all women against all men; life was a rotten deal, with men holding all the aces.

There were torments in the Himalayas, windspouts in the Grand Canyon, and Judges of the Supreme Court got into sacred rages. What could little boys do, too, about differences between their hearthstones, Mother and Father?

She would never again try to knit even one stitch in the long chain of their married life. She hated all that was to come.

They were all eccentric, touched, ill-intentioned, ignorant, superstitious, avaricious, or full members of nitwitry.

He was incapable of nursing an injustice which would cost him good living to repay, an evil thought which it would undo him to give back, or even sorrow in his bosom; and tragedy itself could not worm its way by any means into his heart.

I will never let the vestal fire go out in my innermost recesses': people feel that vestal fire and they feel that its possessor is sacred: they will not harm him. He walks unharmed amongst people reputed savage because they honor what is most good in man.

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. How could their father, said she, so fool them with his lies and nonsense?

You see when a man knows he will be old, he is afraid: when he becomes old, he cares for nothing—love does not count, only comfort; honor does not count, only cheating for a niche.

Therefore," he reasoned with himself, "it is love coming to claim me: I have been so long without love, hated at home, living in terror of my children's lives: it is pure, tender, normal love.

ridiculous if not positively touched, filthy and mean-spirited to be so poor, vain to have airs and graces when so poor, superstitious to hold any religious beliefs, thickheaded to hold any political beliefs, hoity-toity to hold any esthetic beliefs, fustian to pretend to any education, when so poor.

Instead, she looked vaguely about, sniffing that familiar smell of fresh dirtiness which belongs to mankind's extreme youth, a pleasant smell to mothers. Henny had spent twelve years in that atmosphere.

About the girls she only thought of marriage, and about marriage she thought as an ignorant, dissatisfied, but helpless slave did of slavery.

She soon reached a point when she could not sit at the table with him and listen to his misbegotten notions and morality with its mistaken examples.

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

You will never break up my home. I know that's been your object for years and the aim of all your secret maneuvers. I love my children as no man ever loved his before. I know men love their children, but mine are bound up in me, part of me