Quotes from Christina Stead

The light of the years to come, to me; and the law would give them into your charge because you are their mother, no matter what kind of a woman you are.

When a woman hates, she will wreck a dozen lives to pay back what she conceives to be some injury.

I'll find a way. There must be a way. And I'll take my children from you. The man who loves children! You can have your own. That's all you really care about

You were breaking my bones and spirit and forcing your beastly love on me: a brute, a savage, a wild Indian wouldn't do what you did, slobbering round me and calling it love and filling me with children month after month and year after year while I hated and detested you and screamed in your ears to get away from me, but you wouldn't let me go.

the world would not let him rave, this was the great injustice he suffered from: he stalked up and down being angry, in futility;

and the three women, after crying, felt united in a love.

For a moment, after years of scamping, she felt the dread power of wifehood; they were locked in each other's grasp till the end—the end, a mouthful of sunless muckworms and grass roots stifling his blare of trumpets and her blasphemies against love.

I saw my entire life a waste, a desert of shame and unspeakable sorrow, and behind me, a suicided wife!

The man with a peaceful nest to fly home to, has everything; there is no effort he will not make for his mate and offspring.

It has never worked—it never will. I don't know what you want to hang on to me for. You should have let me go at the beginning. Why did you beg me to marry you at Frederick that day? I would have got another man.

when she was sitting staring into space, communing with her disillusion, his heart would be wrung by their unloving beauty.

when he was away she could stand him, and the farther he was away the more she could stand him!

She knows that soon she will have escaped into the world of the people better than us, the great objective world better than Shakespeare and Beethoven and Donatello put together—didn't they all come out of it?

For nine months of the year were trivial miseries, self-doubts, indecisions, and all those disgusts of preadolescence, when the body is dirty, the world a misfit, the moral sense qualmish, and the mind a sump of doubt: but three months of the year she lived in trust, confidence, and love.

What luck have I? I don't suppose you'll be anything but a cheap little accountant yourself—you haven't any chance to make money with a father like that.

I bet I live till ninety, with all my aches and pains. To think that's fifty more years of the Great I-Am. No wonder I want to make away with myself. Who wouldn't?

God, what we women have to put up with; and I'm not even allowed to complain.

she would say to the children as they crowded about her bent shoulders, peering at her satin stitch or Madeira work, "my kids too: I'm not proud; well, I don't care what happens to you kids, I've done my best and if that's not satisfactory, you must try another shop.

I'm an old woman, your mother's an old woman, so I'll be an old woman, and I'll do what I please.

All men are dogs

she said, her children should not live on trash, her children had to fight for their livings, having such a silly, puffed-up ignoramus of a father, her girls were not going to be underfed "mud rats.

Perhaps I have made a mistake, but Heaven knows I have been faithful to my marriage vows." She chuckled, "The more fool you!

The children hid themselves, with receptive ears, round corners.

I know," he said with sudden bitterness, "because your mother's game is working after all. She is turning you against me." "No," said Louie. He looked at her pityingly, "No, I know you don't know it, Looloo.