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

Christina Stead

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Christina Stead
Age: 80 †
Born: 1902
Born: July 17
Died: 1983
Died: March 31
Novelist
Politician
Short Story Writer
Translator
Writer
Rockdale City
Something
Primitive
Passions
Optimistic
Creation
Passion
Human
Humans
Nothing

More quotes by Christina Stead

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Pukka sahib or rank outsider--gentleman or bounder--and it's accent, accent, all the way.
Christina Stead
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All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.
Christina Stead
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I wish I had a man and not a dishrag printed over with big words like 'constitutional rights' and 'progress'!
Christina Stead
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The more we know, the better our intuitions.
Christina Stead
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A single girl must lead a double life don't you think?
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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.
Christina Stead
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A speculator is a man who, if he dies at the right time, has a rich widow.
Christina Stead
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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?
Christina Stead
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Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.
Christina Stead
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The great white city of brotherhood, Washington.
Christina Stead
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It is most oppressive to be an aunt.
Christina Stead
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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
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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.
Christina Stead
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You want to be free and break new ground, speak your mind, fear no man, have the neighbours acknowledge that you're a good man and at the same time you want to be a success, make money, join the country club, get the votes and kick the other man in the teeth and off the ladder.
Christina Stead
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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.
Christina Stead
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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.
Christina Stead
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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.
Christina Stead
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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.
Christina Stead
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Intuition is not infallible it only seems to be the truth. It is a message which we may interpret wrongly.
Christina Stead
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Weak, tea-drinking, effeminate, ineffectual--masters of India, robbers of South Africa, bedevillers of all Europe.
Christina Stead