Best 72 quotes of Christina Stead on MyQuotes

A bank is a confidence trick. If you put up the right signs, the wizards of finance themselves will come in and ask you to take their money.

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

A dominant race did not lie, because it had the whip.

A lie is real; it aims at success. A liar is a realist.

All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.

All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.

Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.

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

A mother! What are we worth really? They all grow up whether you look after them or not. That poor miserable brat of his is growing up, and I certainly licked the hide off her; and she's seen marriage at its worst, and now she's dreaming about 'supermen' and 'great men'. What is the good of doing anything for them?

And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog!

Anyone would think a thin stick like me, weak and miserable, would go down with everything: do you think I get more than my old cough every winter? I bet I live till ninety, with all my aches and pains. To think that's fifty more years of the Great-I-Am.

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

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

A speculator is a man who, if he dies at the right time, has a rich widow.

A tory youth is a youth speculating on his future.

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.

A woman is a hunter without a forest.

Behind the concept of woman's strangeness is the idea that a woman may do anything: she is below society, not bound by its law, unpredictable; an attribute given to every member of the league of the unfortunate.

Charm is a cunning self-forgetfulness.

Creation of something out of nothing is the most primitive of human passions and the most optimistic

Each Australian is a Ulysses.

Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life.

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.

Financiers are great mythomaniacs, their explanations and superstitions are those of primitive men; the world is a jungle to them.They perceive acutely that they are at the dawn of economic history.

Humorists are always pessimists. They're reactionaries: because they see that every golden cloud has a black lining.

I do not want to go to heaven; I want my children, forever children, and other children, stalwart adults, and a good happy wife, that is all I ask, but not paradise; earth is good enough for me: it is because I believe earth is heaven, Naden, that I can overcome all my troubles and face down my enemies.

I don't know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.

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

If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers.

If misery spelled revolt, we should have had nothing but revolt from the beginning of time. On the contrary, it is quite rare.

I hate Bernard Shaw because he says that life is compromise.

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.

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

It is a rule of creative ability that it does nothing of any value, while it is possessed by this afflatus of vanity.

It's fine to be a great democrat when you've a slave to rub your boots on.

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.

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.

I wish I had a man and not a dishrag printed over with big words like 'constitutional rights' and 'progress'!

Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that.

Loneliness is a terrible blindness.

Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.

Men never believe a woman can do anything.

Money has no country.

Money is a jealous mistress If you want money you must want only money. ... I must tell you the one secret of life, there is only one: everything is a jealous mistress, everything is terribly possessive, and, by God, we want to be terribly possessed if we want to get somewhere - and we want to be terribly possessed - anyhow; or what is life?

money that is in billions and monopolies isn't money at all, because the people have none, and money is democratic, everyone has to have some or there's none at all.

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.

Old age and youth cannot live together.

Old age is perhaps life's decision about us.

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

Pukka sahib or rank outsider--gentleman or bounder--and it's accent, accent, all the way.