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

More quotes by 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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Socialist writers are made of sterner stuff than those who only let their characters steeplechase through trouble in order to comeout first in the happy ending of moral uplift.
Christina Stead
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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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It is most oppressive to be an aunt.
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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Weak, tea-drinking, effeminate, ineffectual--masters of India, robbers of South Africa, bedevillers of all Europe.
Christina Stead
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Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.
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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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 great white city of brotherhood, Washington.
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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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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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
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A dominant race did not lie, because it had the whip.
Christina Stead
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If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves, there wouldn't be enough to go around.
Christina Stead
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Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.
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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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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A woman is a hunter without a forest.
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