Christina Stead
To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with.Collection: Book
The great white city of brotherhood, Washington.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Wizards
Women have been brought up much like slaves, that is, to lie.Collection: Women
Ye want to tell the plain truth all your life, woman, and speak straight; otherwise ye get to seeing double.Collection: Art
A single girl must lead a double life don't you think?Collection: Girl
Old age and youth cannot live together.Collection: Age
It's easy to make money. You put up the sign Bank and someone walks in and hands you his money. The façade is everything.Collection: Hands
The French are a tremendously verbal race: they kill you with their assurances, their repetitions, their reasons, their platitudes, their formulae, their propositions, their solutions.Collection: Race
A speculator is a man who, if he dies at the right time, has a rich widow.Collection: Men
Each Australian is a Ulysses.Collection: Australia
The Chinese are a knowing people; and I daresay that is why they once made a religious odor about old age; to prevent their sons from seeing their own future.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Art
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?Collection: Mother
There'll be no sense in sexual theories until women start telling their minds; and, of course, until they have some.Collection: Mind
Venus can see at night without eyes.Collection: Eye
If misery spelled revolt, we should have had nothing but revolt from the beginning of time. On the contrary, it is quite rare.Collection: Should Have
Philosophy is by the timid for the timid.Collection: Philosophy
The more we know, the better our intuitions.Collection: Intuition
Loneliness is a terrible blindness.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Girl
When people are collecting gold they aren't doing business. ... Gold is constipation: even bankruptcy is more fluid. Gold isn't wealth: positions in markets are wealth.Collection: Money
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.Collection: Girl
People who don't like scandals shouldn't be in finance.Collection: People
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.Collection: Art
A dominant race did not lie, because it had the whip.Collection: Lying
There are so may ways to kills yourself, they're just old-fashioned with their permanganate: do you think I'd take permanganate? I wouldn't want to burn my insides out and live to tell the tale as well: idiots! It's simple, I'd drown myself... Why be in misery at the last?Collection: Art
Why is it every careerist tries to turn his mother into a Madonna--to prove his intellect is a virgin birth, papa had nothing to do with it? It's the sign of the misogynist.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Strength
We are primitive men; we taboo what we desire and need. How did the denying of love come to be associated with the idea of morality.Collection: Love