The Man Who Loved Children Quotes

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

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

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

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

“Whatever men say, women know;”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

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

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

“she belonged to the great race of human beings who regard life as a series of piracies of all powers.”
― Christina Stead, 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, The Man Who Loved Children

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

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

“As she looked dully at the band of gold that was with her night, day, in her washings and cleanings, in the children’s sickness and at their birthday parties, that went into the bath water, the dough bowl, and the folds of new cotton print running over the sewing machine, that went into the maternity ward with her and to the manicurist and fortuneteller’s, that she saw when drinking cocktails with Bert and when signing away her every cent on some scrap of paper at the moneylender’s, that stayed with her as stayed the man she had taken it from, she took a grip on herself. If this plain ugly link meant an eyeless eternity of work and poverty and an early old age, it also meant that to her alone this potent bread-winner owed his money, name, and fidelity, to her, his kitchenmaid and body servant. For a moment, after years of scamping, she felt the dread power of wifehood; they were locked in each other’s grasp till the end—the end, a mouthful of sunless muckworms and grass roots stifling his blare of trumpets and her blasphemies against love.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“Henny had never lived in an apartment. 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.

As Henny sat before her teacup and the steam rose from it and the treacherous foam gathered, uncollectable round its edge, the thousand storms of her confined life would rise up before her, thinner illusions on the steam. She did not laugh at the words “a storm in a teacup”. Some raucous, cruel words about five cents misspent were as serious in a woman’s life as a debate on war appropriations in Congress: all the civil war of ten years roared into their smoky words when they shrieked, maddened, at each other; all the snakes of hate hissed. Cells are covered with the rhymes of the condemned, so was this house with Henny’s life sentence, invisible but thick as woven fabric.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

“I love my children as no man ever loved his before. I know men love their children, but mine are bound up in me, part of me-' he paused breathless for a moment. 'In all my misery they are my great consolation; there could be no joy in the world like my home to me. Men wreck their lives, endure backbreaking toil for years for their children. Some women cannot even understand such love as man feels in his strength for those weak ones playing round him who-' He paused again, much moved.”
― Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children