Christopher Isherwood Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

  People, Answers, Asks

  Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, James P. White (1989). “Where Joy Resides: An Isherwood Reader”, Vintage

  14 Copy quote

• For other people, I can't speak - but, personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier - and that's a fact.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Wise, People, Facts

  Christopher Isherwood (2012). “A Single Man”, p.130, Random House

  5 Copy quote

• To live sanely in Los Angeles ... you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Art, Thinking, Voice

  Christopher Isherwood (1966). “Exhumations: Stories, Articles, Verses”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Attitude, Book, Taken

  24 Copy quote

• 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

  Past, Years, Yesterday

  9 Copy quote

• The landscape, like Los Angeles itself, is transitional. Impermanence haunts the city, with its mushroom industries--the aircraft perpetually becoming obsolete, the oil which must one day be exhausted, the movies which fill America's theatres for six months and are forgotten. Many of its houses--especially the grander ones--have a curiously disturbing atmosphere, a kind of psychological dankness which smells of anxiety, overdrafts, uneasy lust, whisky, divorce and lies.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Lying, Divorce, Cities

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Lying, Book, Reading

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Lying, Home

  Christopher Isherwood (2013). “A Single Man: A Novel”, p.5, Macmillan

  9 Copy quote

• The town is an advertisement for itself; none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Imagination, Towns, Visitors

  Christopher Isherwood (1949). “The Condor and the Cows: A South American Travel-diary”

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Writing, People

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Culture, Talent

  "Christopher and His Kind". Book by Christopher Isherwood, p. 65, 1976.

  11 Copy quote

• But seriously, I believe I'm a sort of Ideal Woman, if you know what I mean. I'm the sort of woman who can take men away from their wives, but I could never keep anybody for long. And that's because I'm the type which every man imagines he wants, until he gets me; and then he finds he doesn't really, after all.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Believe, Mean, Men

  Christopher Isherwood (2008). “The Berlin Stories”, New Directions Publishing

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Hate, Nice, Love You

  Christopher Isherwood (2012). “A Single Man”, p.54, Random House

  12 Copy quote

• California is a tragic country - like Palestine, like every Promised Land.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Country, Land, California

  Christopher Isherwood, James J. Berg, Chris Freeman (2001). “Conversations with Christopher Isherwood”, p.91, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Lying, Sunshine

  7 Copy quote

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

  Christopher Isherwood

  Delight, Hooked, Addict

  Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, James P. White (1989). “Where Joy Resides: An Isherwood Reader”, Vintage

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Boys, Men

  Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, James P. White (1989). “Where Joy Resides: An Isherwood Reader”, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Skeletons, Bridges, Iron

  Christopher Isherwood (1963). “The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr. Norris [and] Goodbye to Berlin”, p.186, New Directions Publishing

  4 Copy quote

• The past is just something that's over.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Past

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Differences, People

  Christopher Isherwood (1964). “A single man”

  4 Copy quote

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

  Christopher Isherwood

  Causes, Horror, Terror

  10 Copy quote

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

  Christopher Isherwood

  Crazy, Thinking, Self

  Christopher Isherwood (1964). “A single man”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Past, Squad

  Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, James P. White (1989). “Where Joy Resides: An Isherwood Reader”, Vintage

  8 Copy quote

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

  Christopher Isherwood

  Expression, Faces, Single Man

  Christopher Isherwood (2013). “A Single Man: A Novel”, p.5, Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

• California is a tragic country — like Palestine, like every Promised Land. Its short history is a fever-chart of migrations — the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories — followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving sorrowfully homeward.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Country, Moving, Land

  Christopher Isherwood, James J. Berg, Chris Freeman (2001). “Conversations with Christopher Isherwood”, p.91, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  12 Copy quote

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