Top 100 Christopher Isherwood Quotes
#2. I've always made it a rule to have a suit for every day of the week. Perhaps you'll tell me I'm vain, but you'd be surprised if you knew what it had meant to me, at critical moments of my life, to be dressed exactly in accordance with my mood. It gives one such confidence, I think.
Christopher Isherwood
#3. I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body - even this old beat-up carcass - that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh!
Christopher Isherwood
#4. I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.
Christopher Isherwood
#6. The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.
Christopher Isherwood
#7. Someone has to ask you a question," George continues meaningly, "before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions. Most people aren't that much interested ...
Christopher Isherwood
#8. The other day I made an epigram. I said, Anni's beauty is only sin-deep. I hope that's original? Is it? Please laugh.
Christopher Isherwood
#9. George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.
Christopher Isherwood
#10. Like a long train which stops at every dingy little station, the winter dragged slowly past.
Christopher Isherwood
#11. Lois and Alexander are by far the most beautiful creatures in the class; their beauty is like the beauty of plants, seemingly untroubled by vanity, anxiety or effort.
Christopher Isherwood
#12. Waking up begins with am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now.
Christopher Isherwood
#13. The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they're capable of anything. That's just why they're so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment...
Christopher Isherwood
#14. Experience isn't any use. And yet, in quite another way, it might be. If only we weren't all such miserable fools and prudes and cowards.
Christopher Isherwood
#15. Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.
Christopher Isherwood
#16. Hollywood's two polar types are the cynically drunken writer aggressively nursing a ten-year-old reputation and the theatrically self-conscious hermit who strides the boulevard in sandals, home-made shorts and a prophetic beard, muttering against the Age of the Machines.
Christopher Isherwood
#19. She acted as a kind of rough and ready chemical reagent; in certain combinations she produced certain known results.
Christopher Isherwood
#20. I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.
Christopher Isherwood
#21. The prefect evening ... lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy ... Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence.
Christopher Isherwood
#22. From his angle, the curtain seems to form itself into a shrouded, wavering figure, indescribably terrifying in its very indistinctness. Something waiting, hovering on the threshold of the visible world. Some half-embodied fear gradually assuming a hideous outer form.
Christopher Isherwood
#23. Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be so romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them.
Christopher Isherwood
#25. You, Christopher, with your centuries of Anglo-Saxon freedom behind you, with your Magna Carta engraved upon your heart, cannot understand that we poor barbarians need the stiffness of a uniform to keep us standing upright.
Christopher Isherwood
#26. You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.
Christopher Isherwood
#27. No, Geo - underneath all that, Nan really loves me. It's just she wants me to see things her way. You know, she's two years older; that meant a lot when we were children. I've always thought of her as being sort of like a road - I mean, she leads somewhere. With her, I'll never lose my way.
Christopher Isherwood
#28. This bright place isn't really a sanctuary. For, ambushed among its bottles and cartons and cans, are shockingly vivid memories of meals shopped for, cooked, eaten with Jim. They stab out at George as he passes, pushing his shopping cart. Should we ever feel truly lonely if we never ate alone?
Christopher Isherwood
#29. There was nothing to be done with him and his kind - unless you were prepared to shoot them.
Christopher Isherwood
#31. But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until - later of sooner - perhaps - no, not perhaps - quite certainly: it will come.
Christopher Isherwood
#32. Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about Taffreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire ... Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, in every possible meaning of the word.
Christopher Isherwood
#33. It seemed to me then that to have published a book - any kind of book - would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life.
Christopher Isherwood
#34. What's so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn't any difference between people - well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?
Christopher Isherwood
#36. I'm horrified to find, as I look at these diaries of twenty-five years ago or more, that I don't remember who the people were. "Bill and Tony were constantly in and out. We went to La Jolla" - or something. I haven't the bluest idea who they were!
Christopher Isherwood
#38. In order to get the worst possible first impression of Los Angeles one should arrive there by bus, preferably in summer and on a Saturday night.
Christopher Isherwood
#39. But your book is wrong, Mrs. Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn't a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim, if you'll forgive my saying so, anywhere.
Christopher Isherwood
#42. Everything in the room is like that: unnecessarily solid, abnormally heavy and dangerously sharp.
Christopher Isherwood
#43. All right, we've heard your liberty speech. Does that include us or doesn't it?
Christopher Isherwood
#44. I must honor those who fight of their own free will, he said to himself. And I must try to imitate their courage by following my path as a pacifist, wherever it takes me.
Christopher Isherwood
#45. The pain of hunger beneath everything. At the end of all love-making, the dreamless sleep after the orgasm, which is like death.
Christopher Isherwood
#47. Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination.
Christopher Isherwood
#49. I feel it's so easy to condemn this country [the United States]; but they don't understand that this is where the mistakes are being made - and made first, so that we're going to get the answers first.
Christopher Isherwood
#51. I seldom try to probe the mystery of my sloth. I have squandered a gigantic fortune of work hours ... seems likely that I'll go on squandering till the very end.
Christopher Isherwood
#52. I was very pink and young and English; and quite prepared for a Continent complete with poisonous drains, roast frogs, bedbugs and vice.
Christopher Isherwood
#55. You're a nice boy," she chuckled harshly. "You must come round here one evening. I'll teach you something you didn't know before.
Christopher Isherwood
#57. Fond of bewailing the decadence of the modern world, of denouncing the younger generation for its lack of idealism and public spirit, he is blind to the fact of his own enormous selfishness. He is one of those invalids who make use of their real or imagined sufferings to get their own way.
Christopher Isherwood
#58. The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating of Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause.
Christopher Isherwood
#60. Mont Blanc confronted us, dazzling, immense, cut sharp out of the bue sky; more prosterous than the most baroque wedding cake, more convincing than the best photograph. It fairly took my breath away. It made me want to laugh.
Christopher Isherwood
#61. It's gone!" he repeats, almost ecstatically.
"That's because you let it go," Jacob tells him.
Christopher Isherwood
#62. A grown man who can shed tears without embarrassment is like a yogi who has learned to expel toxic matter from his body by consciously speeding up the peristaltic rhythm. He can eliminate many of life's poisons
Christopher Isherwood
#63. By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.
Christopher Isherwood
#64. I mean, I'm not naive enough to imagine that anyone can be satisfied indefinitely by memories, especially if he's young and full of life, like you. I did my best to help you build up a reserve to keep going on.
Christopher Isherwood
#65. I always say that I only wish to have three sorts of people as my friends, those who are very rich, those who are very witty, and those who are very beautiful.
Christopher Isherwood
#67. I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.
Christopher Isherwood
#69. Even when they are geniuses in spite of it, their masterpieces are invariably warped.
Christopher Isherwood
#70. I like hearing the sound of your voice, but I don't care a bit what you're saying.
Christopher Isherwood
#71. George feels that, even if all this double talk hasn't brought them any closer to understanding each other, the not-understanding, the readiness to remain at cross-purposes, is in itself a kind of intimacy.
Christopher Isherwood
#73. He dislikes even to touch these things, for they are the runes of an idiotic but nevertheless potent and evil magic; the magic of the think-machine gods, whose cult has one dogma - we cannot make a mistake.
Christopher Isherwood
#74. His boredom was like a nostalgia for the whole world. He was homesick for everywhere but here.
Christopher Isherwood
#75. The Nazis hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism. What they called Nazi culture was a local, perverted, nationalistic cult, by which a few major artists and many minor ones were honored for their Germanness, not their talent.
Christopher Isherwood
#76. Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.
Christopher Isherwood
#77. Does he know about me? George wonders; do any of them? Oh yes, probably. It wouldn't interest them. They don't want to know about my feelings or my glands or anything below my neck. I could just as well be a severed head carried into the classroom to lecture to them from a dish.
Christopher Isherwood
#78. Never mind. Never mind. In this brief life, one cannot always be counting the cost.
Christopher Isherwood
#79. If you really have talent, you know, you'll go on writing - whatever people say to you.
Christopher Isherwood
#80. How delightful it is to be here.(Gym) If only one could spend one's entire life in this state of easygoing physical democracy.
Christopher Isherwood
#82. She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.
Christopher Isherwood
#83. Beneath outer consciousness, two other beings, anonymous, impersonal, without labels, had met and recognized each other and clasped hands.
Christopher Isherwood
#84. To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean.
Christopher Isherwood
#85. John Gielgud told us this story about Mae West. She was asked, 'Do you ever smoke after you've had sex?' She answered, 'I never looked.
Christopher Isherwood
#86. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely.
Christopher Isherwood
#87. British Imperialism has been engaged, during the last two hundred years, in conferring upon its victims the dubious benefits of the Bible, the Bottle and the Bomb. And of these three, I might perhaps venture to add, the Bomb has been infinitely the least noxious.
Christopher Isherwood
#88. Every writer has certain subjects that they write about again and again, and ... most people's books are just variations on certain themes.
Christopher Isherwood
#89. If it's going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it's not a world that I want to live in.
Christopher Isherwood
#91. You don't even have a cat or a dog or anything?"
"You think I should?" George asks, a bit aggressive. The poor old guy doesn't have anything to love, he thinks Kenny is thinking.
"Hell, no! Didn't Baudelaire say they're liable to turn into demons and take over your life?
Christopher Isherwood
#92. It seems to me that the real clue to your sexual orientation lies in your romantic feelings rather than your sexual feelings. If you are really gay, you are able to fall in love with a man, not just enjoy sex with him.
Christopher Isherwood
#93. That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.
Christopher Isherwood
#94. I had failed him; I knew it. But I could do no more. It was beyond my strength.
That night, I think, he explored the uttermost depths of his loneliness.
Christopher Isherwood
#95. What irritates me is the bland way people go around saying, 'Oh, our attitude has changed. We don't dislike these people any more.' But by the strangest coincidence, they haven't taken away the injustice; the laws are still on the books.
Christopher Isherwood
#96. In the eternal lazy morning of the Pacific, days slip away into months, months into years; the seasons are reduced to the faintest nuance by the great central fact of the sunshine; one might pass a lifetime, it seems, between two yawns, lying bronzed and naked in the sand.
Christopher Isherwood
#99. The couples were dancing with hands on each other's hips, yelling in each other's faces, streaming with sweat. An orchestra in Bavarian costume whooped and drank and perspired beer. The place stank like beer
Christopher Isherwood
#100. The town is an advertisement for itself; none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination.
Christopher Isherwood
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