Quotes from The Man Who Loved Children

“It is splendid—to be—loved! If we only—can—live up—to the thoughts—of us—by them—that love us!”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“Life is nothing but rags and tags and filthy rags at that. Why was I ever born?”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“What a dreary stodgy world of adults the children saw when they went out!”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“Who tarnishes, assaults, threatens, hates the spirit of man is guilty of crime.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father's head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the dayshine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“All the June Saturday afternoon Sam Pollit's children were on the lookout for him as they skated round the dirt sidewalks and seamed old asphalt of R Street and Reservoir Road that bounded the deep-grassed acres of Tohoga House, their home.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“I do not know how I got through without breaking down, without my heart bursting from sorrow and shame.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“Tolstoy said that “each unhappy family is unhappy in a way of its own—”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“ men call it the tyranny of tears, it is an iron tyranny- no man could be so cruel, so devishlish,as a woman with her weakness, recrimination, convenient ailments, nerves and tears. We men are all weak as water before the primitive devices of Eve. I was patient at first, many years. ' ”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“He talks about human equality, the rights of man, nothing but that. How about the rights of woman, I’d like to scream at him. It’s fine to be a great democrat when you’ve a slave to rub your boots on.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“By smiling, we turn devils into angels, enemies into friends; the cup of poison becomes the loving cup.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“Where, in all the self-righteous lying world, could she turn for a friend? She even thought angrily of her children—they were simply eating up her flesh as they had when they were at the breast, no less.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“You ought to have had a man to make you wash floors and kick you in the belly when you didn’t hurry up for him,” said Henny with all the hate of a dozen years. “I’m as rotten as she is—I’ve had men too—I’ve gone trailing my draggletail in all sorts of low dives—I’ve taken money from a man to keep his children—I’m a cheat and a liar and a dupe and a weak idiot and there’s nothing too low for me, but I’m still ‘mountains high’ above you and your sickly fawning brother who never grew up—I’m better than you who go to church and than him who is too good to go to church, because I’ve done everything. I’ve been dirty and low and done things you’re both too stupid and too cowardly to do, but however low I am, I’m not so filthy crawling in the stench of the gutter, I haven’t got a heart of stone, I don’t sniff, sniff, sniff when I see a streetwalker with a ragged blouse, too good to know what she is: I hate her but I hate myself.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“[...] she had written Clare a letter in school yesterday afternoon and delivered it herself on the way home. In this letter she had mildly said, «Everyone thinks I am sullen, surly, sulky, grim; but I am the two hemispheres of Ptolemaic marvels, I am lost Atlantis risen from the sea, the Western Isles of infinite promise, the apples of the Hesperides and daily make the voyage to Cytherea, island of snaky trees and abundant shade with leaves large and dripping juice, the fruit that is my heart, but I have a thousand hearts hung on every trees, yes, my heart drips alone every fence paling. I am mad with my heart which beats too much in the world and falls in love at every instant with every reflection that glimmers in it.» And much more of this, which she was accustomed to write to Clare, stuff almost without meaning, but yet which seemed to have the entire meaning of life for her, and which made Clare exclaim a dozen times,
«Oh, Louie, I can’t believe it, when I get your letters, you are the same person: when I meet you at school I keep looking at you in surprise!»”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“When we are born, we are studied, and deviations, if noxious to the species, are suppressed; good deviations are preserved. And furthermore, we bear our formula on our arm band!”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“Her poverty was naked on the empty streets, and if no one walked abroad she felt all the more ghastly, like a wretched sinner in the sight of God.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“she saw her husband for the first time: she had married a child whose only talent was an air of engaging helplessness by which he got the protection of certain goodhearted people—”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“She was an old-fashioned woman. She had the calm of frequentation; she belonged to this house and it to her. Though she was a prisoner in it, she possessed it. She and it were her marriage. She was indwelling in every board and stone of it: every fold in the curtains had a meaning (perhaps they were so folded to hide a darn or stain); every room was a phial of revelation to be poured out some feverish night in the secret laboratories of her decisions, full of living cancers of insult, leprosies of disillusion, abscesses of grudge, gangrene of nevermore, quintan fevers of divorce, and all the proliferating miseries, the running sores and thick scabs, for which (and not for its heavenly joys) the flesh of marriage is so heavily veiled and conventually interned.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“Hair under the arms, for example, he said, should never be removed, for nature had put it there, and evidently it had some use. She had suddenly said, “You have too many children, Mr. Pollit.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“In our early days she went with me to the eugenics meetings, but that period soon ended.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“the world would not let him rave, this was the great injustice he suffered from: he stalked up and down being angry, in futility;”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“I love you, I love men and women, I love little children and all innocent things, I love, I feel I am love itself—how could I pick out a woman who would hate me so much!”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“Of course, the morning, every morning, was full of such incidents. That was family life. They were all able to get through the day without receiving any particular wounds; every such thing left its tiny scar, but their infant skins healed with wonderful quickness.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“Sam faced something he had never conceived of in all his life—the triumph of calumny.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“it was the rotten fabric woven by evil, the overnight sham bulwarks of enemies of the people; it would burn to ash at the match of truth.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“Good digestion is for the bovine.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“Our old age is perhaps life’s decision about us—” or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“you do not know what she did not only to me but to the little children. She has tortured them, turned them against me, lied to them,”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

“she is never more herself than when she destroys herself.”
― Christina Stead, quote from The Man Who Loved Children

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