Christopher Isherwood Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.

Christopher Isherwood
His life has been lived, so far, within narrow limits and he is quite naïve about most kinds of experience; he fears it and yet is wildly eager for it. To reassure himself, he converts it into epic myth as fast as it happens. He is forever play-acting.

Christopher Isherwood
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
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
At one campus where I was lecturing, I asked a friend, "How many of my colleagues know I'm gay?" He answered, "All of them." I wasn't surprised. But, just the same, it was kind of spooky, because not one of them had ever given me the faintest sign that he or she knew. If I had spoken about it myself, most of them would have felt it was in bad taste.

Christopher Isherwood
For a few minutes, maybe, life lingers in the tissues of some outlying regions of the body. Then, one by one, the lights go out and there is total blackness. And if some part of the non-entity we called George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep water, then it will return to find itself homeless.

Christopher Isherwood
The only difference was that the Nazis called it "sexual Bolshevism" and the Communists "Fascist perversion".

Christopher Isherwood
What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

Christopher Isherwood
I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.

Christopher Isherwood
Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn't! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you're being persecuted, you hate what's happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you're in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn't recognize love if you met it! You'd suspect love! You'd think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.

Christopher Isherwood
Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.

Christopher Isherwood
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
Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.

Christopher Isherwood
I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.

Christopher Isherwood
If I fear anything, I fear the atmosphere of the war, the power which it gives to all the things I hate — the newspapers, the politicians, the puritans, the scoutmasters, the middle-aged merciless spinsters. I fear the way I might behave, if I were exposed to this atmosphere. I shrink from the duty of opposition. I am afraid I should be reduced to a chattering enraged monkey, screaming back hate at their hate.

Christopher Isherwood
I must honor those who fight of their own free willl, 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
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
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
You've got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.

Christopher Isherwood
Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.

Christopher Isherwood
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
I certainly should have,' he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally-accepted bit of nonsense it is, that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren't far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights.

Christopher Isherwood
Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man - all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died - what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed.

Christopher Isherwood
The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.

Christopher Isherwood
Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.

Christopher Isherwood