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Altruism is selfishness out with a pair of field glasses and imagination.

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
Selfishness
Glasses
Field
Fields
Imagination
Altruism
Pair
Pairs

More quotes by 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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A speculator is a man who, if he dies at the right time, has a rich widow.
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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If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers.
Christina Stead
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About myself - no. I'm unimportant, an observer, a wandering animal.
Christina Stead
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Money goes where money is, money yearns where money is.
Christina Stead
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Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.
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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All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.
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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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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A single girl must lead a double life don't you think?
Christina Stead
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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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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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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.
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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Loneliness is a terrible blindness.
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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Men never believe a woman can do anything.
Christina Stead