Christina Stead > Quotes

“Give me your honest opinion. I don't want truth with a veil on—I like naked ladies naked.”
― Christina Stead, Miss Herbert (the suburban wife)

“It is splendid—to be—loved! If we only—can—live up—to the thoughts—of us—by them—that love us!”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that. Why was I ever born?”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“What a dreary stodgy world of adults the children saw when they went out!”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“I shall never be a dangerous woman; I can make men love, but I cannot make them suffer. It would be much better the other way about. I have seen women able to make men suffer who could not make them love. The more they suffered the more they hung around for a showdown. In the end they did better than I, for it is strange what people will do to be able to suffer and say to themselves, in the night, “I have suffered, I have lived indeed.”
― Christina Stead, Letty Fox: Her Luck

“A single girl must lead a double life don't you think? ”
― Christina Stead

“Who tarnishes, assaults, threatens, hates the spirit of man is guilty of crime.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn't be enough to go around.”
― Christina Stead, House of All Nations

“All the June Saturday afternoon Sam Pollit's children were on the lookout for him as they skated round the dirt sidewalks and seamed old asphalt of R Street and Reservoir Road that bounded the deep-grassed acres of Tohoga House, their home.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“She was an old-fashioned woman. She had the calm of frequentation; she belonged to this house and it to her. Though she was a prisoner in it, she possessed it. She and it were her marriage. She was indwelling in every board and stone of it: every fold in the curtains had a meaning (perhaps they were so folded to hide a darn or stain); every room was a phial of revelation to be poured out some feverish night in the secret laboratories of her decisions, full of living cancers of insult, leprosies of disillusion, abscesses of grudge, gangrene of nevermore, quintan fevers of divorce, and all the proliferating miseries, the running sores and thick scabs, for which (and not for its heavenly joys) the flesh of marriage is so heavily veiled and conventually interned.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father's head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the dayshine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“Whatever men say, women know;”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“I do not know how I got through without breaking down, without my heart bursting from sorrow and shame.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“Tolstoy said that “each unhappy family is unhappy in a way of its own—”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“You see this hand, my good right hand, do you see it, Kit?” Kitty laughed in her throat, a troubled, sunny laugh. “I’ve felt it, too, in my time.” He said mysteriously, lowering his voice again: “Women have kissed this hand.” They both turned and looked at him, startled. “Yes, Kit, yes, you disbeliever,” he said, turning to the younger girl. “Teresa won’t believe me perhaps, for she doesn’t want to love me, but women, several women have kissed this hand. Do you know how women kiss men’s hands? They take it in both their hands, and kiss it first on the back, and then each finger separately, and they hate to let go.” He burst out suddenly into a rough ringing laugh. “You would not believe that has happened—not once, but several times—to your Andrew!”
― Christina Stead, For Love Alone

“You ought to have had a man to make you wash floors and kick you in the belly when you didn’t hurry up for him,” said Henny with all the hate of a dozen years. “I’m as rotten as she is—I’ve had men too—I’ve gone trailing my draggletail in all sorts of low dives—I’ve taken money from a man to keep his children—I’m a cheat and a liar and a dupe and a weak idiot and there’s nothing too low for me, but I’m still ‘mountains high’ above you and your sickly fawning brother who never grew up—I’m better than you who go to church and than him who is too good to go to church, because I’ve done everything. I’ve been dirty and low and done things you’re both too stupid and too cowardly to do, but however low I am, I’m not so filthy crawling in the stench of the gutter, I haven’t got a heart of stone, I don’t sniff, sniff, sniff when I see a streetwalker with a ragged blouse, too good to know what she is: I hate her but I hate myself.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“The sensuality, delicacy of literature does not exist for me; only the passion, energy and struggle… Most of my friends deplore this: they are always telling me what I should leave out in order to have success. But I know that nothing has more success in the end than an intelligent ferocity.”
― Christina Stead

“ men call it the tyranny of tears, it is an iron tyranny- no man could be so cruel, so devishlish,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. I was patient at first, many years. ' ”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“[...] she had written Clare a letter in school yesterday afternoon and delivered it herself on the way home. In this letter she had mildly said, «Everyone thinks I am sullen, surly, sulky, grim; but I am the two hemispheres of Ptolemaic marvels, I am lost Atlantis risen from the sea, the Western Isles of infinite promise, the apples of the Hesperides and daily make the voyage to Cytherea, island of snaky trees and abundant shade with leaves large and dripping juice, the fruit that is my heart, but I have a thousand hearts hung on every trees, yes, my heart drips alone every fence paling. I am mad with my heart which beats too much in the world and falls in love at every instant with every reflection that glimmers in it.» And much more of this, which she was accustomed to write to Clare, stuff almost without meaning, but yet which seemed to have the entire meaning of life for her, and which made Clare exclaim a dozen times,
«Oh, Louie, I can’t believe it, when I get your letters, you are the same person: when I meet you at school I keep looking at you in surprise!»”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“He talks about human equality, the rights of man, nothing but that. How about the rights of woman, I’d like to scream at him. It’s fine to be a great democrat when you’ve a slave to rub your boots on.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“Where, in all the self-righteous lying world, could she turn for a friend? She even thought angrily of her children—they were simply eating up her flesh as they had when they were at the breast, no less.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“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—”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“she belonged to the great race of human beings who regard life as a series of piracies of all powers.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“…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.”
― 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!”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“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.”
― Christina Stead

“In our early days she went with me to the eugenics meetings, but that period soon ended.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“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.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“By smiling, we turn devils into angels, enemies into friends; the cup of poison becomes the loving cup.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“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.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children