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

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
Black
Lining
Every
Humorists
Always
Reactionaries
Pessimist
Pessimism
Cloud
Golden
Clouds
Pessimists

More quotes by Christina Stead

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The great white city of brotherhood, Washington.
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To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with.
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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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A speculator is a man who, if he dies at the right time, has a rich widow.
Christina Stead
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A dominant race did not lie, because it had the whip.
Christina Stead
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There'll be no sense in sexual theories until women start telling their minds and, of course, until they have some.
Christina Stead
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Weak, tea-drinking, effeminate, ineffectual--masters of India, robbers of South Africa, bedevillers of all Europe.
Christina Stead
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Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.
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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If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers.
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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It is most oppressive to be an aunt.
Christina Stead
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The more we know, the better our intuitions.
Christina Stead
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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.
Christina Stead
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The waste, the insane freaks of these money men, the cynicism and egotism of their life... I'll show that they are not brilliant, not romantic, not delightful, not intelligent.
Christina Stead
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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.
Christina Stead
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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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Gentlemen are overestimated, that is my experience.
Christina Stead
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A woman is a hunter without a forest.
Christina Stead
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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.
Christina Stead