Christopher Isherwood Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

Waking up begins with saying 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. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home.

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

Christopher Isherwood
The talk of pale, burning-eyed students, anarchists and utopians all, over tea and cigarettes in a locked room long past midnight, is next morning translated, with the literalness of utter innocence, into the throwing of the bomb, the shouting of the proud slogan, the dragging away of the young dreamer-doer, still smiling, to the dungeon and the firing squad.

Christopher Isherwood
I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.

Christopher Isherwood
You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.

Christopher Isherwood
She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.

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

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

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

Christopher Isherwood
I often feel that worse than the most fiendish Nazis were those Germans who went along with the persecution of the Jews not because they really disliked them but because it was the thing.

Christopher Isherwood