Quotes from Christina Stead

Men are always good to fools and perfect idiots," cried Henny impatiently. "A man will run ten miles from a woman with sense.

A month before our marriage, I knew it would be a well-nigh hopeless union, yet so great is a young man's idea of what is honorable and sporting that I could not renege: and so I determined that the union would be fruitful and from misery would come much happiness and splendid men and women;

You fall madly in love with one man and nearly break your heart because he throws you over and years later you find out you would have been miserable with him; and you go to a man you don't care for and it's just the same with him too. Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that. Why was I ever born?

Your old man sent me anonymous letters himself to make me divorce him." She rippled with he-hes. "I hung on to spite him. I didn't want him. It's my only pleasure left." She laughed.

I knew before marriage to Henrietta Collyer that she and I should never have come together, but a young man's sense of honor, so often mistaken, misplaced as medieval chivalry, prevented me from making the break.

Am I to spend the next twenty years in the high-minded company of a smug Philistine who doesn't so much as make me a decent husband?

I say, frankly, Looloo, that I believed that I could remold her life and with my wife and children make a little nucleus of splendid men and women to work for the future. That was, is, my only dream, my life hope: for I am only a dreamer in realities. I want you to understand me, Looloo: she did not even try to.

All the best gods are made of stone and say nothing.

Sam,' said Saul fervently, 'when you talk, you know you create a world.

Men call it the tyranny of tears, it is an iron tyranny—no man could be so cruel, so devilish, 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.

When Fate held out her hand, he made it a rule to take that hand with whatever it held, for Fate always had a lesson for him, just as every book that fell on its face open, and every scrap of muddy newsprint blowing in the wind and even every shop sign might hold a message for him, because the Word was sacred to him; and whatever that message might be, he was not one to turn his face away, but he smiled at Fate, for he believed Fate was on his side.

it was only much later that I found out hardness worked better than love.

it's immoral to work to make money. There's something unlucky in it. You got to work for the work. You got to work on a farm, for the farm - then it makes money.

Every work of art should give utterance, or indicate, the awful blind strength and the cruelty of the creative impulse, that is why they must all have what are called errors, both of taste and style.

About myself - no. I'm unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.

I know your breed; all your fine officials debauch the younger girls who are afraid to lose their jobs: that's as old as Washington.

People who don't like scandals shouldn't be in finance.