Top 100 Isherwood's Quotes
#1. Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction).
Edmund White
#2. 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
#3. It's gone!" he repeats, almost ecstatically.
"That's because you let it go," Jacob tells him.
Christopher Isherwood
#5. 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
#6. 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
#8. 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
#11. 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
#12. We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.
Christopher Isherwood
#13. Isherwood received bags of fan mail, far more than Tennessee Williams had for Memoirs. There was the sexual and jokey (a fifteen-year-old English schoolboy sent his photo and wrote on the back, "My tits are on fire").
Christopher Bram
#14. 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
#16. 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
#18. The gramophone keeps reiterating a statement about life with which I do not agree.
Christopher Isherwood
#19. Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination.
Christopher Isherwood
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Bacon. Eggs. Toast. The same things Angie had made for her the past two years. Every day. Without fail.
E.E. Isherwood
#24. All right, we've heard your liberty speech. Does that include us or doesn't it?
Christopher Isherwood
#25. Everything in the room is like that: unnecessarily solid, abnormally heavy and dangerously sharp.
Christopher Isherwood
#27. 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
#28. The town is an advertisement for itself; none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination.
Christopher Isherwood
#29. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. I mean, what is this life of ours supposed to be for? Are we to spend it identifying each other with catalogues, like tourists in an art gallery? Or are we to try to exchange some kind of a signal, however garbled, before it's too late?
Christopher Isherwood
#34. She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.
Christopher Isherwood
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. His boredom was like a nostalgia for the whole world. He was homesick for everywhere but here.
Christopher Isherwood
#38. 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
#41. I like hearing the sound of your voice, but I don't care a bit what you're saying.
Christopher Isherwood
#42. Even when they are geniuses in spite of it, their masterpieces are invariably warped.
Christopher Isherwood
#44. 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
#46. George feels flattered and excited ... He can't resist slipping into the role Kenny so temptingly offers him.
Christopher Isherwood
#47. 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
#48. I have had an unpleasant feeling, such as one has in a dream, that I myself do not exist.
Christopher Isherwood
#49. 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
#50. By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.
Christopher Isherwood
#51. 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
#52. Sun shines," wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories, "and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends ... are in prison, possibly dead." The
Erik Larson
#53. I discovered Christopher Isherwood in college. His writing style is so direct, warm, and inclusive.
Claire Danes
#54. I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.
Christopher Isherwood
#55. She acted as a kind of rough and ready chemical reagent; in certain combinations she produced certain known results.
Christopher Isherwood
#58. 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
#59. Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.
Christopher Isherwood
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?
Christopher Isherwood
#65. I remember a rainy, depressing afternoon when she remarked 'What a pity we can't make love, there's nothing else to do,' and he agreed that it was and there wasn't.
Christopher Isherwood
#66. Like a long train which stops at every dingy little station, the winter dragged slowly past.
Christopher Isherwood
#67. George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.
Christopher Isherwood
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.
Christopher Isherwood
#72. I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.
Christopher Isherwood
#73. 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
#74. 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
#76. Isherwood did not so much find himself in Berlin as reinvent himself; Isherwood became a fiction, a work of art.
Ian Buruma
#77. I do and always shall maintain that it is the privilege of the richer but less mentally endowed members of the community to contribute to the upkeep of people like myself.
Christopher Isherwood
#78. 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
#79. Well, I think you'll find that the soft ones object to being cheated even more than the others. They mind it more because they feel that they've only themselves to blame.
Christopher Isherwood
#82. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#89. 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
#90. There was nothing to be done with him and his kind - unless you were prepared to shoot them.
Christopher Isherwood
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.
Christopher Isherwood
#94. My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.
James D. Watson
#95. 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
#97. My perfect day would be to go on a picnic up Mt. Wilson with Christopher Isherwood, Greta Garbo, Aldous Huxley, and Bertrand Russell.
Janet Fitch
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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